36 Family Secrets People Found Out As They Got Older That Made Them Question Their Entire Existence

It would seem that nearly all families come with baggage and a few skeletons in their closets. So, when redditor u/Human-Lychee8619 asked, “What’s a family secret you found out as an adult that completely shocked you?” people flooded the replies with wild revelations and uncovered secrets that rattled their reality. Here’s what people revealed:

1.

“My mom was busted for stealing from her previous employer. She was the accountant and was skimming off the top for years. My brother and I were in high school then, and the business owner felt bad for us, so they kept it quiet and made her pay all the money back. No charges were pressed. I’ve never asked my mother about it, but my dad (my parents were divorced) spilled the beans a few years ago. What a prick, but I guess my brother and I should know.”

—jjerkkas

2.

“My parents got married, divorced, and remarried to each other in a year. Apparently, my dad was screwing around on her. My brother and I did not find out until we planned their 50th wedding anniversary.”

—TheBeardedBeard

3.

“No joke, my grandfather accidentally mutilated and almost lost his penis trying to masturbate with a vacuum cleaner. It was a weird thing to find out in your 20s. He would have been in his 60s at that point. It happened after he was a grandfather and was done having kids.”

—Sufficient-Step6954

4.

“My middle name comes from my grandfather’s affair partner. When my mom asked him to help name me, he picked her name because ‘it was one of the most beautiful names he’d ever heard.’ My grandma was PISSED when she found their love letters in their attic.”

—RissaSharp

5.

“My dad had an affair with the babysitter. She had a child a few years before I was born. This woman was still our babysitter for a few years, and I played with her kids, including her son (my brother), growing up. I didn’t find out until I was a teen, and another kid told me. I was like, ‘No, how do you figure that?’ She told me she was my half-brother’s cousin, so I considered what she had to say. I went home and asked my mom. She told me the truth, which I think she and my older siblings had also learned recently. I’ve seen some pictures, and the kid looked/looks just like my dad.”

—Yeah-NO_FORSURE

6.

“There was always a rumor that ran around my family that my grandmother was not who she thought she was. My great-aunt always hated her, and the rest of the family would keep my grandmother at arm’s length. The rumor was that my grandmother was not related to anyone in our family and that she was won during a poker game when she was a baby. A few years ago, my uncle really got into the whole 23andMe/genealogy thing and figured out the cousins that he was supposed to have DNA matches with (because of my grandmother) had ZERO matches. He was getting matches with a bunch of other people who were from the same general area.”

“He finally reached out to one of them, and THEY had an old family story about how someone in their family had a massive gambling problem during the Depression. He was trying to pull a fast one on one of the guys during a poker game and thought that by putting his newborn daughter up in the pot, the guy would fold, and he would get all of the money. Except the guy DIDN’T fold and won the hand (and my grandmother).”

—aep5245

7.

“My grandfather (who was married to my grandmother) had a secret girlfriend for about 40 years. She is two years older than my mom and has been with him since she was about 19. They got married when my grandmother passed away. He’s 91 now, and she’s 67 or 68. Oh, and my mom’s godfather who lived with my great grandparents was, indeed, with my great-grandmother.”

—av_cf12

8.

“My mother was never a nice or measured woman, so after her death, when people started telling me about a confession she made a couple of times while white intoxicated, I didn’t doubt it much. She said that the man I knew as my estranged father was actually not my father. My birth father was killed in a fire that she set. It was a little much to handle, and though I always considered it possible, I didn’t really have any evidence this was the case until I did a 23andMe test, and my father turned out to be a different person than I expected. Through messaging a new cousin, I found out that the man who was my bio father did die in a fire of unknown cause one weekend when his wife and kids were out of town. I’m pretty sure my jealous, rageful mother killed my father.”

—GeneralSpecifics9925

9.

“Growing up, I always knew my dad’s parents had never been married. It wasn’t until after both my dad’s parents had passed that he started talking about why. When my grandparents met, they were so enthralled with each other that they dropped everything and immediately ran away together. However, both of them were already married and had a few kids each. They left the state and never divorced their other spouses because they didn’t want to be found. I hate cheaters. As a mom, I can’t imagine leaving my children at the drop of a hat for a new life. So many lives were screwed up because of this. But without them doing that, my dad wouldn’t have been born, and neither would I.”

—Fluffy_Momma_C

10.

“My aunt gave her brother over $1.5 million over the last 30 years because he kept trying to start businesses (and failed). He also owes my dad over $200k. His children are wild successes and have been for over a decade (one owns a penthouse in Toronto, and the other is a dentist with multiple practices). His wife is an engineer. He did nothing. He didn’t raise his kids or clean the house; his wife did it all. He only stopped asking my aunt for money a couple of years ago. I’ll be going to his kids and telling them about this because my dad is 71 and in the hospital because he’s had to work to the bone. My aunt is 75 and still working. They need that money back. I’ve never been so disgusted with my family before.”

—Difficult_Tank_28

11.

“I found out that my parents are first cousins. As a child, my parents would refer to my grandparents as auntie and uncle, which I used to think was out of respect, but I would come to find out their true relationship during a one-off conversation.”

—GarethGazzGravey

12.

“My mom tried to break things off with my dad a week before they got married, but my grandpa (mom’s dad) pressured her into going through with the marriage because they had already paid for all of it. This explained so much, but I didn’t learn this until I was 22.”

—BrokenLink100

13.

“My real dad has, in fact, tried to be in our lives several times. He even bought me my first Xbox and PlayStation. Mom said otherwise for 19 years of my life.”

—ItsChilly1

14.

“It’s heavily implied that my great-grandma arranged to have my great-grandfather killed.”

—kman0300

15.

“My great-grandpa went AWOL from the British Royal Navy and stole a Canadian’s identity to come to the US.”

—mynameisipswitch2

16.

“My grandfather was a priest, and my grandmother was a nun. They met when she was delivering food to his church. They fell in love and ran off. This was in the 1920s. My parents never talked about it, but of course they knew. I think my mom told us my grandfather just bailed on the priesthood and got married — not quite the full story. I learned the actual details by doing my own ancestry research.”

—tmhowzit

17.

“I found out two years ago at age 34 that my dad had a secret family, and I have an older half-sister. Then I discovered he tried to name me her exact first and middle name before I was born. He pushed very hard to give me her name, which was their plan at first, but thankfully, my mom changed her mind at the last minute for an unknown reason.”

—Flourpower6

18.

“My grandma had a child out of wedlock, and everyone knew. I found out because I started at a new school, and some girl I had never met kept insisting we were cousins. Turns out, she actually was my cousin, and her mom was my dad’s secret half-sister.”

—StuffedOnAmbrosia

19.

“My grandparents got swindled out of some very valuable land in West Virginia that was rich in earth minerals. A religious group convinced them to donate it to get into heaven.”

—Indigo_Sky-

20.

“I found out I was adopted at 13 completely accidentally by finding a document with my last name listed differently. That was fun.”

—unHelpful_Bullfrog

21.

“I just learned a few weeks ago that my grandmother (who is white) was engaged to a Japanese man in CA back in the early ’40s. When America entered WWII, he was rounded up and deported. She tried to follow him, but her parents barred her from doing so. How she ended up marrying my racist grandfather and moving to the mountains of WV is something no one seems to know. But it was why she was insistent on teaching my mom and siblings that racism was wrong and supporting the civil rights movement by sending her side hustle money to organizations that supported desegregation and diversity.”

—FiendishCurry

22.

“My great-grandma just disappeared one night when my grandma was around 11 and never returned. Several years ago, and with a lot of digging, we discovered she’d run off with someone and was buried in another city. I still can’t understand how someone would just leave their kids and never come back.”

—inedible_cakes

23.

“This was never a secret, but I learned at my grandpa’s funeral that he won a Pulitzer Prize. It was from 31 years before I was born, so I guess by the time I came along, it was old news, and everyone was sick of hearing about it, and he was always very humble about his career.”

—ice-eight

24.

“My grandfather started in law by representing many of Al Capone’s men in Chicago, early 1930s.”

—mackeprang

25.

“My grandmother kept her real birth year and age a secret from her three children their entire lives. It was only after she and then my grandpa had both passed away that my mom found her birth certificate during the house clean-out. It turns out that my grandma was born in 1912, not 1918. After this came to light, we all wanted to know why. The prevailing theory was that when my grandparents got married in 1944, being six years older than your husband (and also being 32 and getting married for the first time) was bordering on scandalous. By claiming she was born in 1918 — the same year as my grandpa — my grandmother made the relationship acceptable. And everyone was clueless until after she died.”

—snerdie

26.

“After graduating high school, my father told me my uncle had a child with my first-year English teacher. I never knew my uncle had a child. The mother (my teacher) and the child apparently shut my uncle out of their life. My teacher knew who I was. My cousin doesn’t know I exist, and we apparently were in the same high school the whole time.”

—Effective-Mix7622

27.

“My mom got pregnant by my dad’s best friend in between my sister and myself (she’s three years younger than me). She got an abortion, and apparently, my dad temporarily took her back. They split when my sister was 1. So that didn’t last long.”

—Mycologymommy

28.

“My dad has another family, and we have no idea if his younger kids know we exist. He doesn’t speak to us, but my mother warned him that his funeral would probably not be the best time for us to meet for the first time. He told her he would call us to make it right. I’m still waiting for the call, but he sent me a birthday card.”

—Powerful_Leg8519

29.

“That my aunt we all loved and grew up with was really my uncle’s affair partner.”

—Significant_Bet_6002

30.

“A cousin I grew up with was actually a sibling. Our mother still refuses to come clean with the family.”

—bakernut

31.

“My great-grandmother adopted my grandmother and destroyed all the documents so she would never know her real name or where she came from.”

—DynoJumpyr

32.

“I found out I have a younger brother last year. After my dad split with my mum 25 years ago, he met a woman in the newspaper, and they had a kid. He kept it a secret for 20 years.”

—kooksies

33.

“When I was 23, I met my parents for lunch before we went to my great aunt’s funeral. At some point, my dad said, ‘I hope my sister isn’t there.’ I asked if he meant his sister-in-law because, as far as I knew, he was the second of three brothers. Nope. Apparently, after his parents split up when he was pretty small, his dad moved back to his hometown and got remarried, then had two more kids. My dad met his younger sister when he attended another family funeral a few years before this, and his sister came up to him and introduced herself. I still haven’t met the woman, but somehow she found me, and now we’re friends on Facebook.”

—OwnRazzmatazz010

34.

“I discovered that my father and his mother had a HUGE falling out because my parents didn’t bring us to church and into the religious fold. They didn’t talk for years. My mom was always the one who would drop us off if grandma and grandpa were taking care of us, etc. I never noticed as a kid, and they mended things at some point when I was still young. But it caused a huge rift I was blissfully unaware of as a child.”

—mccarseat

35.

“A strange woman approached me at my grandmother’s funeral and introduced herself as my aunt Dorothy. I had never heard that name before and never have seen her since that day. Apparently, there was a teen pregnancy in the ’50s, and either she left or was kicked out. I still do not know the full story, but that was the day I found out there were five kids in my dad’s family, not four.”

—WalkielaWhatsUp

36.

And: “My aunt, who we used to visit and hang around with when I was little, was actually my father’s ex-wife. She couldn’t have kids and was willing to put aside her differences with my parents so she could have a part in our lives.”

—RevGrimm

Did you learn a major family secret when you got older? What was it? Tell us in the comments or share anonymously using this form.

Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.