What's a long standing personal or family mystery that occupies your mind?
Is there ever something that happened to a family member that you will ever know? Has anyone gone missing under mysterious circumstances? Is the place next to your great grandmother's friend's dad's house totally haunted?
My uncle doesn't drive nor consume pork anymore after returning from Canada, but every time we ask about that, he doesn't say anything useful.
So my theory is he hit a pig with a car and felt sorry or something
My dad doesn't like to talk about most of his life prior to having me. He's very protective of his image and reputation, and I really have no idea who he is as a person, only as the father that raised me.
My mom's oldest sister left home when they were young. Like, very young. We didn't get to meet her until after Grandpa died. All that we (the next generation) have learned is that she is from a previous marriage that also is not to be spoken of. This is not a prideful, secretive, traditional, or whatever type of family like this may sound. Very open and progressive. Except for this one thing. Just she, my mom, the other sisters will absolutely shut you down if you ask any questions.
I'm guessing someone got molested.
That's our thought. They would have to only be keeping a secret to respect her wishes, not to hide family scandal or something.
My dad committed suicide when I was 5. I'll never know why he did it.
If he had depression there might not have been a reason. It's not uncommon for men to spend their lives silently fighting with depression, and when I was 5 a man going to a therapist would have been seen as a weakness and weird.
Remember that depression is a disease, looking for a reason makes as much sense as asking why someone had their heart fail. I recently watched "In Limbo" with my wife and I think they handled it very well (TW: Suicide). When the depression grabs you you're not able to think clearly or reason your way out of it.
Someone stole a 20 dollar out of a hollowed out crucifix my grandmother had and they found the money ripped in half in the driveway and I got blamed for it when I didn't do it.
Someone ordered payperview porn on the TV and I got blamed for it even though I didn't know the fucking code and I wasnt home on the day and time it was bought. I'm still salty as fuck over this one.
A picture of my grandfather standing next to a woman, taken before he met my grandmother, and she is holding a baby. It didn't surface until after grandpa's funeral. It was taken 500 miles away from where my family lives. I live in that other city now. I wonder if I've met my half aunt or uncle randomly in passing?
In the late 80s my uncle was heavily involved in Unix system administration and architecture at a major defense contractor. He was gay AF and smart as a whip. He had been hinting that he knew something important about the whole Iran Contra thing and then one day he just dropped dead. Like literally they had no explanation other than a sudden cessation of brain activity (there was a technical term I don't remember). The family requested that his body be kept so that we could have a separate autopsy done, but mysteriously he was misrouted and instead was cremated. It was fishy as fuck. I'm not sure whether he was offed by the government or possibly entered witness protection. I just don't believe the story that his brain just shut off.
Why my moron of a father married at all. Why he picked my mother. Why he married so fast after meeting her. Why he had kids.
Everything I've ever known of him says he should never have done any of those things.
Morons do not have the forethought to comprehend consequences.
Mine's a bit dark. Dad's family is from China. They had 7 boys including him. It's a "mystery" what happened to the girl(s) but not really... It's not spoken about and I don't think anyone has the balls to ask anyway.
When my father was a child, he, his siblings, and his parents were traveling in northern Mexico at night and had missing time and vague memories of a weird light and being carried by lots of little hands.
pygmy festival.
pigmeos
This isn’t too exciting given the region, but I had a great-great-grandfather in the Appalachians who supposedly died in a domestic dispute. It was once mentioned, however, that said “domestic dispute” was actually my relative snitching on a bootlegging operation.
Am Appalachian. This sounds about right.
Some vague stories around my grandfather before they migrated that sound like a godfather film but which no one knitted anything about.
The last Yarnfather
Oops. lol. I’ll leave the typo now!
I've been told that my grandpa's brother's (granduncle?) face was on the $20 bill of a cult. He was definitely very much in the cult and it does seem they had their own currency on their creepy property, but the details I've been able to find are pretty scarce and I've never seen the supposed currency.
granduncle?
Great-uncle is the term you're looking for.
I suppose it would dox you to much to give us the name of the cult?
This is the place:
Am I gay?
Won't know until you try it out.
Yes.
There is a guy looking like my grandfather and other members in my family, but is a part of the family next door (of my grandfather's house)
23 and Me says my cousin is my sister...?
So, this is likely just the randomness of gene inheritance.
If we express cosanguinuity as percentages, you and your parent are at 50%, you and your grandparent 25%, etc. You get half your DNA from each parent, after all. But what about siblings? With siblings, you get into averages. You and your full sibling each got half your DNA from your mother and half from your father, but because the selection from each is random you could share anywhere from 0% to 100%. Rather than a flat 50%, you get a bell curve that peaks at 50%.
What if your sibling has a child with someone unrelated to you? Well, you and your niece or nephew are probably at about 25%, but because siblings are on a curve and there's a pair involved, you could be anywhere from 0% to 50%.
Similarly, first-cousins are typically about 12.5%, but 25% wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility and you could even get 50% if, say, their fathers are identical twins. If you and your cousin are simply on the upper end of the cosanguinuity bell curve, I could easily see one of those systems getting confused and thinking you're half-siblings, who would have a curve from 0% to 50% and peaking at 25%.
In short, testing just two random relatives doesn't actually tell you a lot unless you're testing a (supposed) ancestor and descendant. You would need to also get your parents and your cousin's parents tested to get anything definitive, and testing your grandparents too wouldn't be a bad idea for accuracy.
That also assumes any two unrelated people share 0% of their DNA. We all have common ancestors, if your uncle married a woman that happened to share 10% of your mom's DNA then you and your cousin could have more DNA in common as well.
Thank you, that seems a lot more likely than either one of us being secretly adopted by our aunt and uncle.
There was apparently a family fortune in Britain that was swindled by a fancy Halifax lawyer, who was one of the fathers of Canadian confederation. I have no other details.
One of my uncles died from a gunshot. I say it like that because most of my family doesn't believe he committed suicide but was killed by his girlfriend. I was really young when it happened and I know almost no details. Seems rude to ask about it now and I don't want to retraumatize anyone but I am quite curious of the circumstances and if it really was suspicious or if his family just didn't want to accept that he was depressed and hid it away.
Supposedly my mother's maternal grandfather (so, my great-grandfather) wrestled a bear. Also supposedly, there is a statue somewhere in West Virginia to celebrate this fact.
I've done some surface level searching online for this but haven't found anything. Cool to think about, though!
Something about Al Capone. Originally I heard we were related, but I don't think that's true, but my great grandma did chase him out of her house with her cane at one point.
How great-grandpa caught syphilis? Towards the end, doctors said a lot of his ailments were because of that one, little issue. You can speculate, but...
Syphilis can hang out for something like 30 years. Maybe they were on a break, or he got infected before they got together.
Years ago my mother was going through an old box of photos we brought with us when we moved to a new country. These were all in weird size formats, I guess it was developed on whatever size paper that shop had on hand that day. There were pictures of my mother and father when they got married, various family events and family members. Then there were at least 3 black and white (maybe purplish or orangeish?) polaroid sized photos of my father and mother with 2 babies about the same age, then there was another of my father, my mother, myself and some kid - we were both dressed alike more or less (short sleeve button up shirts and shorts) and were standing in front of the front door to one of the apartments we rented, me and the other boy were standing in front of my parents and an uncle and aunt besides my mother and father. The last one I saw was of me and this boy, on what I remember was my first day of kindergarten. Right after the picture was taken I remember crying as some kids do when their parent leave them at the entrance to a new school. I mean I still can feel the tears on my face to this day...I guess I was a little dramatic
The weird thing is, I remember all of my childhood friends, I remember us doing stupid things, I remember falling out of a swing and whacking my head so hard on concrete I saw stars. I remember us getting in trouble for going swimming in a nearby river when we were like 6 or 7. I remember waking up, I remember getting ready for school, I remember breakfast, I remember going to sleep. I remember all of these things, but I don't remember this random kid from these photos. I've asked my mother about it once or twice, but she says she has no idea what I'm talking about. I've tried looking for the photos again, but I moved away a while ago and it's bugged me all of my adult life. Did I just maybe have a really vivid dream after watching some tv show? Did I space out while we were going through those photos. I tell myself he was probably just a cousin that spent time with us. it's just weird because I'm the only kid of that age group in the family, I was the first grand kid in both families there were no other kids my age in the family when I was growing up
A personal mystery for me is why I changed? As a young kid/toddler the depictions of me and stories are just absurdly wildly different of a personality. Very similar to the personality my sibling has. At some point around the age of 5 or 6 I just did a 180°. I was a fearless, extroverted, charismatic toddler and suddenly became an introverted, quiet, bookreading shut in.
I wasn't sad or depressed or anything and I still did do stuff and had fun, but it was not in line with before