" My parents would have blend in to their graves without telling me . "
Recently, wewrote aboutsecrets people accidentally stumbled upon, and members of theBuzzFeed Communityhad their own stories to submit — especially regarding family secrets. Here are 47 shocking things people discovered about their families.*
- Along with some replies from theoriginal Reddit ribbon .
bank note : There are acknowledgment of violence , slaying , suicide , sexual assault , sexual abuse , tike misuse , domesticated fierceness , and incest .
1.“When I was young, I was told my grandfather was murdered in his home in a break-in gone wrong. I later found out (through my own Internet research) that he was actually murdered in a drug deal gone wrong. He was the drug dealer.”
— u / nmkelly6
2.“When I was a kid, my parents told me that my dad’s father died of a burst appendix several years before I was born. I found out after my dad died that this wasn’t true. I knew my dad’s parents had split up, but apparently they did because his dad was cheating on his mom. A few months after they split, his dad murdered his affair partner and then died by suicide in a hotel. I learned this when we were cleaning out my dad’s apartment and found newspaper clippings and letters to my dad from various family members about the incident. The only true thing from the original story I was told was the date his dad died.”
— magicaltooth53
3.“I got big into family research during COVID times as a means to keep myself busy. I ended up finding a newspaper article about my grandfather from the ’50s. Turns out he and two others kidnapped and robbed a guy while he was AWOL from the Army. He was young and presumably going through tough times (still no excuse), but he and the rest of my paternal side of the family are big into Trump and ‘law and order,’ etc. We don’t speak anymore, but I think about reaching out to ask him about it often.”
— u / lovelikeapathy
4.“The son of my aunt’s long-term boyfriend (essentially my uncle for all intents) was groomed starting at around 12 years old (maybe earlier, but that’s when I met him; we’re the same age) by his then 19-year-old step-sister and got her pregnant when we were around 15. The secret, though, is that his mom and his stepdad are cousins, and so he got groomed by his cousin and got her pregnant. They have two kids. He’s pretty messed up with a peculiar mental health history and is pretty much a deadbeat. I wouldn’t say he’s a bad person, but only because I’m aware of his upbringing. I’m not sure if he’s been made aware of this yet, but when I found out, he was unaware.”
— uranium / Imaballofstress
5.“My uncle died by suicide; everyone was told because he got laid off, and his wife took their two girls and left him. He was a child predator, so he killed himself to avoid the blowback.”
— atomic number 92 / Toilet_Rim_Tim
6.“My uncle was a Monsignor in the Lincoln, Nebraska, Catholic diocese. Part of his job was to counsel the victims of sexual abuse and convince them not to press charges. He also relocated defending priests to different parishes to get them away from the children who were ‘responsible’ for the temptations that caused the rape. It was a big family secret. Frankly, it was a big secret of the church. I don’t think I was supposed to know about it.”
— atomic number 92 / FindMateStraightFux
7.“My sister doesn’t know that her father (a stranger) raped our mother and that’s how my sister was born, out of rape. I will never tell her. Our mother always told my sister that her father was in the military when my sister would ask about who her father was.”
— Anonymous
8.“My aunt had an abortion, and it was her father’s baby. When my dad was around 19 and his sister was a few years younger, she came to his room one night and asked him to help her get an abortion. She swore that if he told anyone, she would kill him. He helped her, and they never spoke about it again.”
" A twosome of X afterwards , I hear my parent talking about it . I ante up a trivial attention to it , but not much .
Cut to another couple of decade subsequently , and my granddad is ineffective to live by himself . My aunt and uncle moved in with him to take care of him . That ’s when I found out that my aunt had for a while refused to talk to her don because he would n’t apologize for ' something , ' but they at long last reconcile because he promise her the household when she died . My mom , being inquisitive like me , had already dug more into this , and evidently , my grandfather had sexually abused my aunt for year as a untried child and teenager .
Now she did n’t directly tell my mummy that it was my granddad ’s tike she abort , but … c’mon , 2 + 2 . "
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
— uranium / At_Work_Account_Syn
9.“I was hanging out with my cousin one night 20 years ago (I’m in my forties). She got drunk and told me she’d been sleeping with our other cousin since they were in high school. I kinda stopped hanging out with her and him afterward. Gross. Ten years later, at a family gathering, his wife got drunk, and they started arguing. She told everyone those two were banging, and she showed pictures to the family she got from his cloud of her and him in…positions. Gross. Now everyone knows. My female cousin was so embarrassed she was crying. My male cousin was shamed and left. He and his wife divorced later. The female cousin moved across the country. The male cousin lives alone and doesn’t talk to anyone. I have a strange family.”
— u / Educational_Tell2228
10.“My husband and I found my father-in-law’s biological family through one of those DNA kits. We were excited to learn more about his family. My father-in-law was adopted by his parents as a baby, and he always thought that his parents were helping out a niece who got ‘in trouble’ as a teenager. Win-win for everyone, right? Wrong. My FIL’s bio mom had been married to a soldier in World War I, and while he was away, she got pregnant a couple of times and then sold the babies. When he returned, he found out and divorced her, but she sold several more after that. We know of at least seven siblings who found each other. My FIL was the youngest we know of, and all the others are now deceased. We never told anyone else in my husband’s family. My FIL would have been devastated. He passed away recently, so there is no reason to tell the rest of the family now.”
— uracil / Comfortable_Total865
11.“I’ve learned that my family is full of secrets, some really dark. I’ll share this one; I learned when I was a teenager that my Nan and my great-aunt (they’re twins) married their biological brothers and had children with them. They each had multiple miscarriages, and the babies that made it to term and were born died shortly after — all but one. My Nan’s first daughter (my eldest aunt) is a product of incest and is still living today. My Nan is especially close with her and sort of obsessed with her. She holds her in higher regard than anyone else, including her other kin. They have a very twisted, codependent relationship.”
" The only reason my Nan and great - auntie terminate up with different men ( my Nan with my grandfather ) is because a remote relative found out about the incestuous affairs and contacted the brothers ' in high spirits - ups to report their marriages ( they were in the military ) . They were dishonorably discharged , and the news of why spread out . It became a public shame , which guide to dissociate . My Nan ’s brother / ex - husband hang around even after she remarried to my grandfather , who hump everything . Sadly , it ’s come out since his passing that she never really loved my granddaddy , and she was never felicitous with him . She was hard abusive to my mom and her siblings , save for the firstborn . Super toxic .
How this truth came to lighter in our household is because my aunt ( not the incestuous one ) was looking through an old torso she found in the attic , and she notice a crew of paperwork , photos , certificates — you name it . The most damning evidence was birth credential of deceased fry belong to my Nan and her brother , including the surviving youngster , their firstborn sister . What ’s interesting is that her nascency certificate has a different name on it . Anyway , my auntie spilled the bean to my ma and their comrade , and it ’s since made its path down the line . "
— uracil / between - page
12.“When I was about 13 (many, many years ago), my parents told me that the man I knew as my dad isn’t my biological father. Mom said that my real father had alcoholism and wouldn’t get a job, so she left him and eventually remarried. I didn’t really think about it much because my adopted dad was great, and I got to grow up in a very loving family. Years passed, and every now and then, I would Google my biological father’s name. Nothing ever came up until one day I found out that around the time I was born, he went to jail for assault. Later he got out on parole and raped and killed someone. From what I can tell, he’s still alive and on Death Row.”
" But I rarely recollect about the berth . I know I was blessed to have a much better life than I would have had if he had been in it . "
— uracil / hawkun
13.“I have triplet half-brothers who live across the country. It is a long story, but their mom was visiting where I’m from and hooked up with my dad. She went back home and, for some reason, decided to call my dad and tell her she was pregnant, but begged him to stay out of her life and not ruin her marriage (it is debatable if my dad knew she was married when hooking up). Dad agreed, and everyone went about their lives.”
" About 25 years later , through a weird serial of events , I found out about this . I looked them up , and we are 100 % related to , no question . I did have to say my other siblings so that none of us ever gets a desoxyribonucleic acid test and risks the truth come out to our half - brothers or the man who believe he is their forefather . Based on socials , they are a happy family , and we do n’t want to chance ruining that . "
— u / OreoSoupIsBest
14.“My mom was raped at 13 by the preacher’s 19-year-old son at church camp. He got caught in the act. Afterwards, they blamed her, and when they found out she was pregnant, they made her get an abortion. Nothing ever happened to the rapist. My grandmother, who has dementia, told me while thinking she was talking to my mom. (We look similar enough.) I have never told my mom that I know.”
— atomic number 92 / KronikQueen
15.“Thanks to an Ancestry test as a birthday present from my wife, I learned that my dad is not my father, I was conceived through IVF, and my parents would have gone to their graves without telling me. What THEY didn’t know, and that my newly-discovered half-siblings informed me of, is that all of us have the same dad because the fertility doctor swapped his own supply with the donor sperm he was supposed to be using.”
" It ’s not the hombre from the Netflix doc , but it ’s the same kind of scenario ; apparently it ’s horrifyingly plebeian , and was even more so 30 + years ago , before it was even well - understood enough to be considered a crime , and being able to test your own deoxyribonucleic acid was much rarer . "
— u / NightSpringsRadio
16.“Recently, my family found out that our grandfather had an affair 50+ years ago, which resulted in a secret child being born and our grandfather losing his job. Everyone was shocked, but they don’t know that the reason it was kept secret so long is not because it was an affair, but because the mother of that child was underage.”
— atomic number 92 / PiperPug
17.“My super judgmental and religious grandma actually conceived my mom out of wedlock by a traveling salesperson, and my gay grandpa begged to take her on as a beard (he never outright said that, but I feel like they both knew). I’m still looking for my biological grandpa because I have his alleged info, but I’m not sure what subreddit to use.”
— uracil / dumn_and_dunmer
18.“My dad was born in 1926 and volunteered for the Navy in WW2. He went through basic training (which I can’t imagine) and was deployed to a destroyer. On board, he was a witness/victim to an explosion; all of the bones in his hands were broken. They set them between two boards until he could be offboarded to a hospital ship. They asked him if he wanted them to knock him out first, and he said no to the first one and then yes, please, for the second.”
" That ’s not the arcanum . The secret is that he then took diazepam / valium every daylight for the eternal sleep of his life . My pappa had PTSD , and I did n’t know until after he croak in 2006 . "
— uranium / overmonk
19.“I found out about my half sister because my mom drunkenly told me the reason my parents split up was because my dad cheated on her with one of her oldest friends. I found my half sister on social media and reached out to her. We met up and talked for a bit. She was pretty nice and we now hang out whenever I’m in town. My parents still do not know I know, and the only person who does know is my best friend.”
— Anonymous , 19
20.“My grandfather told me about his dad and how abusive he had been to his ten surviving children. … His father beat up their mother one day and threw her outside into a blizzard, where she died in the snowy walkway, and he commented on the small snowdrift that had built up over her corpse. After his mother died, he had to drop out of school in sixth grade and get a job to help support his dad and siblings. Unfortunately, the evil bastard never saw consequences besides dying alone of old age in the 1970s.”
— u / Xenovitz
21.“My mom’s brother had an extramarital affair that may have produced a child. My mother found out because they used to mail correspondence to my mom’s place of work. My mom got suspicious why letters for her brother were being mailed to her office, so she opened one. That’s how she found out that the affair partner was pregnant. My mom threatened to tell my uncle’s wife if my uncle continued with the affair. My mom doesn’t know if the affair ended or if the child was born. My uncle died decades ago, and my cousin (my uncle’s only child with his wife) passed from cancer last year. We do not know if his wife ever knew.”
— u / IrishBoiler
22.“One of my ancestors was a notorious brothel madam and dodgy business owner in the 19th century. We figured it out after my dad’s side of the family got into DNA tests and family history. It turns out the family history story, as told to my grandma and her sisters by their grandma, was a complete fabrication to hide the shameful truth. I’m slightly disappointed because it was a fabulous story linking us to the aristocracy and exotic seafarers. I’m pretty sure my great-great-grandmother (daughter of the brothel madam and a convict) didn’t want me or any of her other descendants to know the real history.”
— uracil / Sea_Suggestion9424
23.“My cousin-in-law raped his niece and got her pregnant. They were both young teens at the time. His mother is the niece’s grandmother, and she had custody of her. She is a monster. She would make the girl sleep on the floor next to her bed — so how she even let this happen is inexcusable. She then made her give up the baby, who has issues because of the inbreeding. This happened four years ago, and we’re just now finding out about it because the niece is an adult now and finally speaking up about it.”
— uracil / imthrownaway93
24.“My mother-in-law got drunk and told me my father-in-law (they’re divorced) cheated on her with her coworker when she was pregnant with my now-husband. My husband and sister in law have no idea. And now I’m stuck with that in my head. She never told them because she didn’t want it to affect their relationship with their dad, which is totally understandable. Oh, and the coworker’s husband was a cop who proceeded to stalk them all over the place out of anger after the affair.”
— uracil / TeachingSalt8254
25.“My cousin was adopted. Apparently, his Mom was never able to have kids, so they adopted him but never told him. He’s 36 now with a family, and his father passed away last year. He still doesn’t know.”
— u / eguez780
26.“Back in the late ’70s, I found out that my father was a member of the KKK.”
— u / HornetParticular6625
27.“My mom’s dad wasn’t actually her dad. She had always suspected it, but my grandmother took the secret to her grave. She died when I was 16. A few years later, my mom’s ‘dad’ married a horrible woman who ran everyone else off. When that happened, one of Mom’s uncles let it slip that she had a different birth dad and helped us start tracking him down. He was a really cool dude. We got to have about four years with him before he passed suddenly.”
— u / KitSokudo
28.“My half-brother and half-sisters don’t know our father got my mom pregnant and left her after finding out about me. So they don’t know I exist. The siblings and I are all in our 40s now — I’ve located one on Facebook, and I really want to reach out, but it’s not fair of me to blow up her life just because we have a coward for a father. I’ve actually gotten the ancestry testing done, and my ancestry account settings allow matches to contact me — I’m hopeful one of the siblings will get the testing done too and find out that way.”
— u / JoyfullMommy006
29.“I have a half-brother from my mom that she had before she was with my dad. I’m currently 35 and the third of four kids from my parents. They’ve been married for 40 years this year, and I found out from my younger sister back in 2010 (when she was a pregnant teenager) that my mother told her she had a kid when she was a teen and gave him up for adoption. I didn’t tell anyone else until I was doing an Ancestry.com family tree and showed my mother, who got VERY curious about it. I asked what she was looking for, and she dodged the question. I told her I knew, and she was shocked. I told her I had known for over 10 years. She told me the name she gave him was my first and middle name switched, and that’s how she came up with my name when I was born. I also found out that the PIN code she uses for a lot of things is his birthday.”
" I ’m still very curious if there ’s a way I can find a way to relate with him , but I am not certain that it ’s my place to find and give away he was adopt if I could .
I never told my two older chum about this , but my dad has known since before he and my mom were together . "
— JKeefe416
30.“After my brother passed, I requested his mental health records, which indicated our father sexually molested him as a child. I was really close to my father and brother and feel like I would have known, but I don’t want to be one of those family members who say it never happened when it did.”
— Anonymous , 60 , Colorado
31.“My mom has been lying about our biological father for 50 years. She always told us he abandoned us when I was five. All my relatives would say how weird it was because he was such a doting dad. One day she accidentally slipped and confessed to my cousin that she used to throw away all the cards and gifts he sent me and my siblings for Christmas and our birthdays because she decided it was better if he wasn’t in our lives due to his alcoholism.”
— Anonymous , 50 + , USA
32.“My father-in-law grew up with a younger brother. Their father had severe depression and alcoholism, and he died by suicide when they were both kids. Their mom (my wife’s grandma) had a male coworker who had been a really close friend when her husband was still alive, and he became something of a surrogate father to both my FIL and his brother after their dad passed. He was a really good, kind, generous man, whom my FIL stayed close to for the rest of his life. Now, you’d look at pictures of my FIL and his brother and think, ‘they don’t really look that much alike,’ but I don’t think anybody ever really gave it much thought.”
" The foster father and my FIL ’s brother both give out a few years ago , and a distant full cousin shared with my wife that she had found out from another family penis that the foster father had actually been more than the mother ’s admirer ( including when her husband was still live ) ; he had been her lover … and my FIL ’s comrade ’s biologic father . The brother spent his entire living suppose his forefather had died by felo-de-se , but in actuality , his parentage father had been there the whole time , do like a foster forefather until the 24-hour interval he died . He never notice out . … Nobody in the crime syndicate talks about it to this Clarence Day . "
— u / joethemusicman
33.“My half sister is the daughter of the woman my bio dad was having an affair with while my mom was pregnant with me. My sister is 6 years younger than I am, and she doesn’t know that her parents got together while my bio dad was married to my mom. All of this came out during the planning for my wedding. I’m not sure I will ever tell her that her mom is one of the reasons that our father divorced mine. The fallout led to me not speaking to him for a couple of months while I processed. Even after we did speak, things never went back to how they were before. We went no contact after the wedding for a lot of reasons, but that was definitely part of it. My sister still doesn’t know that it’s a big reason why.”
— Anonymous , 26 , Ohio
34.“My dad was cheating on my mother with sex workers when she was pregnant with me. I found out a couple of months after he died, and I was looking through emails.”
— Anonymous , 19 , Texas
35.“I found out my father was cheating on my mother when I was 11. I was home alone with him one day during the summer and went up to the family computer to play Sims or something. He had left it on, and there was a weird chatroom up with messages that said something like ‘my wife can’t know’ and ‘where should we meet’. I don’t really remember because my heart started beating really fast, and I left the room in a daze. I didn’t know what to do, so I walked around the block a couple of times.”
" I only ever told my boyfriend ( now married man ) about it because I wish I had never found out . My papa and I have a tenuous family relationship , and I have talked to my mom in late age about how terrible and absent ( physically present , emotionally absent ) of a husband and father he was . I order her if I had been married to someone like him , I would have divorced him year ago , and she got really placid . I think she knows he was n’t the best selection of husband or father , but they ’re still matrimonial , and in recent class , he has gotten good , mostly because I endanger to cut all impinging with him if he did n’t go to therapy and psychiatry . Needless to say , it was not a happy house to grow up in . "
— Anonymous , 29 , NYC
36.“I had a friend tell me that his mother, who, on her deathbed, confessed that he was adopted and his eight siblings (ALL sisters) weren’t his siblings. He was always uninvited, left out, disallowed at family gatherings (apparently because of his skin tone and facial features); and he told me that he was adopted due to his biological parents being deported back to Northern Africa (Algeria) due to having fraudulent birth certificates and passports.”
— smellycowboy28
37.“My mom got pregnant with my oldest sibling while married to another man. I accidentally found old documents that proved the dates, which she promptly burned so that my sibling would never find out.”
— u / Leading_Sample399
38."[I discovered] that my grandpa was a mobster, but that he never went to jail because his brother (my great uncle) was an agent with the FBI and kept him protected."
— u / KissMyAlien
39.“My dad’s oldest brother (both deceased now) was likely the product of incest between their mother and her father (their maternal grandfather).”
— atomic number 92 / HeadFit2660
" sound like you mean incestual sexual abuse of their mother by her father .
I know that the scurrilous character is imply , but my belief is that we take a stronger point of view against tike predators when we clearly state that the human activity were abuse . I believe it is important to be very clear about abusive situations because victims ' experiences have been dismissed and cut for too long .
I can not imagine how the girl suffered , particularly with the never-ending admonisher of that child . I would think that she entertain horribly mixed feelings while lift the minor . All while bon ton forced her to accept the situation and remain quiet . "
— uranium / scattywampus
40.“DNA testing definitely brings up ghosts nobody expects. My MIL has pretty terrible adoptive parents and really wanted to know her ‘real’ family. So we got her as a test since I’m into family trees. She was told she was adopted because a family in the church didn’t want her. Actually, it was two people stepping out on their partners. Her father’s kids were upset to find out she existed because it ruined their vision of him, and my MIL was only a few months from one of the kids in age.”
" Her mother had a son after my MIL that she hold on ( by her husband ) , and he was actively looking for his full-grown sister ever since his mom accidentally note it when dementedness hit . His wife recollect he was dog confused memories , but he was right ; he had a sister . It ’s just interesting how some the great unwashed oppose excited and happy to cover sept , and some have a visceral response . "
— u / Girls4super
41.“My uncle repeatedly raped my aunt, his younger sister, to the point where he locked her in a room with him and didn’t open the door/stop what he was doing until my grandpa brought out a gun and broke the door. My younger sibling was accosted by my drunk grandmother during a Thanksgiving visit, which is how we found out. She trauma-dumped on an eight-year-old.”
" My old baby also revealed to my young sib that our uncle molested her as a Thomas Kyd — also while inebriated . "
— u / noeinan
42.“My mom got kidnapped when she was like 13 and was never reported missing because she was a ‘bad kid,’ who got into trouble often. She was dropped off a month later at the same spot where she was taken. I love my grandparents, but I always looked at them differently after finding out.”
— uranium / SecretDonkeyAcct5
43.“My mom is really into genealogy and has been since a high school biology project that I asked her for help with. Years later, she really wanted one of those DNA tests, so I got her on. She found all these relatives in different countries. … She became pen pals with some of them and everything. We were looking at other relatives (I don’t remember if she asked me to look or if I looked on my own; it was a long time ago), but I found someone who was listed as her son who wasn’t my brother and wasn’t that much younger than her.”
" I asked her about it , believe it was a error . Turns out she was plunder at 13 and was sent away to a ' particular school day ' for her pregnancy and she gave him up for adoption when he was bear . I still feel horrible knowing that she went through that . "
— uracil / whyisitsofuckingcold
44.“I did a 23andMe test and found a cousin no one knew about. My dad’s brother got a girl pregnant in high school, she gave the child up for adoption, and never told him.”
— u / jonnicm
45.“My dad was molested as a child by his older sister until he was ‘old enough to fight back.’ My mom told me after he showed up to my 15th birthday dinner late and absolutely plastered, when I asked why he had alcoholism and if it was my fault. He never knew I knew, and no one else in the family knows about it at all. He died from his addiction almost two years ago, and I’ve spent years trying to balance the man who emotionally abused us for years with that scared little boy.”
— uranium / ShawtyLikeAHarmony
46.“I have a sister who was put up for adoption when my mom was 16 years old. My brother and I never knew; our parents never mentioned it. My grandfather had said something about 27 years ago, and it didn’t make sense until I took an ancestry DNA test. Sadly, my mother passed before she could meet her first daughter again.”
— u / Wannabe - not - me
47.And finally…“For some odd reason, we weren’t supposed to know that my grandfather hunted, killed, and collected memorabilia from Nazis in WW2, but alas, it was the family secret.”
— atomic number 92 / screamydreamies
Submissions have been edited for length / lucidness .
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence , call 911 . For anon. , confidential helper , you may call the 24/7National Domestic Violence Hotlineat 1 - 800 - 799 - 7233 ( SAFE ) or chat with an advocate via the website .
If you or someone you know has experienced intimate ravishment , you’re able to call theNational Sexual Assault Hotlineat 1 - 800 - 656 - Bob Hope , which routes the caller to their nigh intimate assault service provider . you’re able to also look for for your local centerhere .
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telephone dial 988 in the United States to reach theNational Suicide Prevention Lifeline . The 988 Lifeline is uncommitted 24/7/365 . Your conversation are innocent and confidential . Other international self-annihilation helplines can be get hold atbefrienders.org . The Trevor Project , which ply help and self-annihilation - prevention resources for LGBTQ young , is 1 - 866 - 488 - 7386 .
