Do you have an "unsolved mystery" in your family?

[begin_within]

Something along the lines of "Nobody knows where..." or "Nobody knows how..." or "We never found out..."
Share the story, please!

[bicentennial_baby]

1. Yes!

Once, several years back, my at the time drunken sister revealed to me that my Mother had a child in 1962 that she gave up for adoption. His name was John. We have no idea what ever became of him. I don't really care, but it really bothers my Sister. :shrug:

[SPKrazy]

8. you and the OP look a lot alike

in your avvie anyway ;)

Here's my mystery, my mom was going to marry a guy from Turkey and then didn't at the last minute, not discussed in my family, I found this out from the son of my mom's college roommate who happened to go to college and live on the same floor of the dorm i lived on in college.

So the mystery is what is the real story and i don't know.

i know my dad loved my mother very much and i was born much later than that so no question there who the father is. just who this man was and what happened to him and all.

:shrug:

[bicentennial_baby]

11. That is strange...

As is your obsession with my Kucinich-lookalike-ness :P

:hi:

[SPKrazy]

12. I was obsessed with your e-coli-ness before

now it's just another thing :rofl:

[Fleshdancer]

2. Sort of....

My grandfather ran away from home when he was a teenager, lied about his age and enlisted in the Army to fight in WWI. My father never knew who is grandparents were and my grandpa refused to talk about his childhood or his parents. He took his secret to the grave with him and I've been trying to find the answers through geneology. So far no luck though.

[Breeze54]

3. Yes... me!

:rofl:

[SeattleGirl]

4. Yes, though the mystery involves a family friend.

Years ago, my youngest brother had a girlfriend named Candy. They broke up but stayed friends. Candy had a pretty bad family life, so she was often over at our house. She became like a sister to us, and like a daughter to my mom.

Candy left one night to go somewhere, but she never showed up. Her body was found a day or so later, out in the middle of a field. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death. My brother and his friends were all questioned, as were other people who had known Candy, but to this day (and it's been over 20 years), they still have not caught who did it.

I hope they eventually catch the SOB's who did this (police are certain there was more than one person involved). What they did to that sweet young girl would turn your stomach.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

6. That's so sad...

Poor kid... :cry:

I hope they do find the people responsible. It seems like there are a lot of long-unsolved crimes that are now being resolved thanks to DNA testing...

[SeattleGirl]

9. I hope so too, Goddess.

Candy was only 15, I believe, at the time of her death. She was really sweet and funny, but sometimes she did things that were a bit over her head (trying to be tough, I think). Not meaning to imply she was that night, as most of us think she was followed by whoever did this to her.

I think of her every time I hear "Stairway to Heaven", as that was the song they played at her memorial service. :cry:

[jobycom]

5. My great grandfather was a Mississippi river boat captain who vanished

Just never came home. No news was ever received of anything happening to him, nor of any whereabouts. I recently googled him, for the fun of it. He had the same name as a mutineer killed off the coast of New England, and more promising, there were several families with the same name upriver from New Orleans, which makes me wonder if maybe he just married someone else up there and never came home to his first wife. Or if she even was his first wife! :) But who knows? Neither may have anything to do with him.

[greatauntoftriplets]

7. My mother had two brothers named John.

The first-born John was born in 1894 and lived until the early 1960s, when he committed suicide. I was 13 at the time, we were told that he had killed himself, then that he had died accidentally. That is something of a mystery, and something the family never talks about.

:wtf:

The second John (who had a different middle initial -- E and not P) was born about 1909 and died in 1911.

Both my mother and I were change-of-life babies, so I am not nearly as old as that sounds. 58 on Tuesday. Gaaaaahhh!!!

[Chan790]

10. I do. It's a locally-famous murder mystery too.

My great-grandfather (one of the most connected businessmen in Hartford at the time) was found during the March thaw in the Connecticut River with a bullet in his back after disappearing Christmas Day 1942 (My grandmother's 19th birthday.) with several thousand dollars.

He owed $50,000+ in gambling debts to various unsavory underworld types and was involved in organized crime so it's not really an unsolved mystery as to what happened, only to who killed him.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

13. Kind of...My grandmother was married once before she married my grandfather...

She mentioned it to me once, explaining that she got a divorce because he had been unfaithful to her. She never talked about it, and always seemed ashamed of it. Years later, I learned that her ex was unfaithful with another man. The story I was told was that he needed to be married in order to advance his government (civil service) career.

I've often wondered about the man, and felt sorry that the circumstances of the day compelled him to marry someone he didn't love; and sorry that my grandmother suffered for it as well.

[WolverineDG]

14. I have 2 or 3 cousins in Brazil

It was long a family rumor that my uncle had a family in Brazil & was confirmed on his death. However, his kids in the US destroyed the documents, so I don't know who they are or where they are from.

dg

[SOteric]

15. Quite a mystery, yes.

My cousin's wife awoke in the middle of the night to find her husband had left the bed, an unusual thing. She didn't hear any sounds in their home. It was perfectly still. She got up to see where he was and found the house dark and empty, but the front door wide open. My cousin was found hanging from a tree in their front yard by a belt not his own.

After a cursory investigation, the police ruled it a suicide.

No note was ever found. Gian-Carlo was a devout Catholic. He had never shown any signs of depression, in fact he was known to be rather even tempered with an easy sense of humour. He had no money problems, no health problems, no ties to any type of criminals or criminal enterprise, and no real enemies. Most strange of all, they lived in a very small village in Northern Italy, not really known as a hotbed of crime.

[begin_within]

16. creepy!

[u4ic]

17. How about a "nobody would tell"

There was a huge rift in my paternal grandmother's family - enough that it caused it to basically fall apart. Feuds stuck for life, and there were even two siblings who she never saw again when they left home as young teens.

All but one of the players is dead - the lone being a great aunt (she's close to 100) and will not disclose what caused it.

[begin_within]

20. That's creepy! I wonder if she can even remember what it was.

Seems like we remember the emotion created by it longer than we remember the actual facts.

[u4ic]

21. She has been asked

and all she says is "that's in the past".

She does remember, but has either just let it go, or doesn't want to tell (that side of the family was/is very secretive, which of course makes the feud even more intriguing).

[Nevernose]

18. Isn't that on Oprah on Monday?

Not that I'd know or anything, of course, because I'm way too masculine.

And, in my defense, I went fishing this morning, and came home around nine, when it got too hot, and Oprah was talking about those Nigerian scammers, and there wasn't anything else on much...

Okay, fine. I watched. But it doesn't count, because I TIVO'd through the commercials and the boring parts.

[begin_within]

23. I will watch Oprah, if she has someone on it who I'm interested in. So what.

She knows how to get at the dirt. She asks the question we all want to ask but would be too embarrased to if we were talking to that person. She can get away with it because she's Oprah and we're not.

[Nevernose]

46. It was meant to be humorous

The joke being that Oprah is a TV show geared towards women and the stereotypical woman's interests (and apparently does so quite well, good for her).

Which is even more ironic because oftentimes what interests women is the same thing that interests men. In other words, HUMAN interest, just marketed towards women. Case in point: last week I recorded the episode on autism and distributed it to two sets of friends I know that have recently had children.

Sorry, I should have put a smiley or something on my first post. I don't have much inclination for the fluff pieces, but she does occasionally bring up some serious issues, and I tune in (albeit through TiVo) when she does.

[Jade Fox]

19. Yes, it's....

What the fuck is wrong with my older sister!!

Seriously. She's been a screw up her whole life and nothing seems to be able to change it.

[China_cat]

22. My grandfather was a twin. (fraternal, boy and girl)

Which we didn't find out until after he died. We can track his sister through census records up until she's 6 years old. After that we have no idea of what happened and there's nobody left who would know. (They were 6 in 1910)

Accompanying this is the question of why their mother, who died when they were 4, was sent back to be buried in her birth family's cemetery plot...with no graves taken on either side of her...instead of being buried in the family plot she married into. For the time and place, this is really strange.

[Patiod]

51. That was only a few years before the big influenza epidemic

Maybe that's what happened to his sister. Lots of deaths to influenza, and it's something people didn't talk about.

The part about his mother is weird..

[China_cat]

54. No grave for her though.

The flu took a lot of family members in 1917 and 1918. She'd have been 13 or 14. While infants didn't always get a marked grave at that time, a girl almost marriage age surely would have.

[cynatnite]

24. The one person who could tell has died...

My grandmother lived in Austria and Germany before moving here to the states in the 50's. She absolutely would not discuss her family living there or those of her past. She told my father he had a twin brother who died, but refused to disclose any other information. We know bits and pieces by digging on our own. There is a huge black hole in this part of my family and the only person that could have answered died a year ago.

It's like she decided she had no life prior to moving here.

[Rosemary2205]

25. Who stole all of Mom's sissors.

Growing up my mother was always screaming someone stole her "good" sissors. They would disappear and never show up again. In 20 years I have no doubt the woman bought at least 60 sissors. They moved out of the house after being there 50 years. Every nook and cranny was cleaned out by my 9 siblings. - Her current "good" sissors came up missing........... again.

We think Tom Cruise was sneaking in and stealing the sissors for some sort of L Ron Hubbard ritual.

:)

[fudge stripe cookays]

41. Holy shit! We're related!

Or at least had the same mom!

Did your mom also complain that she could never find the Scotch tape? :D

[Rosemary2205]

43. Yep -- poor Dad had it rougher.

he could never seem to keep a hammer a hand saw or a shovel.

10 kids, lotsa woods ((treecamps)) -- how could it be any other way. :) :)

[Arkansas Granny]

53. It was that way at my house. It was just understood that the dog did it.

3 kids, several acres of woods that we used as the "back yard".

[Droopy]

26. There is a ghost in mom and step-dad's house

My mother and sister claim to have heard it on several occasions. I have seen it. It's a little boy.

[amitten]

48. Oooh, tell about it! I love ghost stories.

Could you see through him? How old is he?

[cobalt1999]

27. My grandfather had an illegitimate child with a black woman

This was back in the 1930's. So, we've got a whole black side of the family that no one knows anything about.

It caused a huge rift in the family line back then. My grandmothers side was (or became) extremely racist, for example, her brother led the Florida chapter of the KKK. The part of the family closest to my grandfather became the opposite (I guess because blacks were now kin).

So, if you're black and you were born in the panhandle of Florida in the 1930's with questionable parentage, I just want to say "Hi, Uncle!"

[YellowRubberDuckie]

28. I have a brother I've never met.

When my sister was alive, she was obsessed with finding him. He's probably in his 50s now. My dad shacked up with a woman he met at a bar for several years. Apparently my brother's name is Bobby, but as for his last name, we don't know. My aunt would never tell us. She was cruel to the boy when he was a kid. He lived around the corner from them with his mother. He'd come over for birthday parties or to play with her kids, and she'd turn him away. I really can't stand that side of the family. Once my dad died we apparently weren't good enough to keep in touch with. I'd like to find him. Apparently I have nieces and nephews that are older than me. My dad would probably have loved to have met him and apologized for not being a part of his life. It was his biggest regrets. He tried every day to be the best dad to use he possibly could because he felt so guilty. And I'm sure he would have loved to have met his grandchildren. It was one thing he always wanted but never got. Probably one of the reasons I don't want to have kids. It wouldn't be fair that they wouldn't get to meet their granddad.
Duckie

[NewWaveChick1981]

29. It's more of a family secret, at least to my mom...

My mother found out my brother is gay by snooping in his belongings in 1989. He tried to keep that from her, but she found out anyway and was devastated. My sister and I, who had always known but not had it confirmed, were fine with it, and he was completely relieved that we didn't hate him. Why in the HELL would I hate my brother? His sexual preference is his business, not anybody else's. I love him no matter what, and the fact that he's gay just adds another interesting dimension to his personality. :) My sister feels exactly the same way, and the three of us can talk about everything openly. He told me a while back that he never thought he'd be able to do that, but he definitely can with us. :)

Mom accepted it eventually, but she took great pains to hide it from my now-deceased stepfather (I think he knew anyway, but it didn't matter to him :) ). Mom's current husband doesn't know, but I think he has an idea about it. She also hides it from her friends. She expends a great deal of energy hiding this fact. Why not just let him be himself? :shrug:

[trof]

30. Yep, and it's a doozie!

My uncle died a couple of years ago.
He was in his 80s and lived alone since his wife died a few years before.

I helped his 2 kids with going through files, getting financial info, settling his estate, etc.

In the last 2 or 3 years of his life he wrote several large checks to 'cash'. Almost weekly, or every couple of weeks.
Many were for identical amounts, like several for '$125', or '$130'.
The total amounted to well over $100,000.
And we have absolutely no idea where the money went.
His son said he could only think of 3 things a feller would want cash for, "Drugs, gambling, or hookers".

His drug of choice was bourbon.
There's no evidence of his gambling in his whole life, and the nearest casino was hundreds of miles away in another state.
So...that leaves just one thing.

Any other ideas?

[Chan790]

31. That would be cheap for quality hookers...

Looking at my Hartford Advocate, it seems $200; 1 hour outcall is going rate. Maybe he got a senior discount. Do they do that?

[trof]

32. He lived in a very small southern town.

;-)

[Rosemary2205]

44. That's about 266 visits a year.

If it was hookers that was one HORNY OLD MAN!!


($100000plus/$130)/3 years.

[AggieGal]

33. My Mother's Sister

In the early 70s, my Mother's sister was kidnapped in Louisiana and found dead in a field a week later. The police have not found out who did this to her. I wish we knew.

She died before I was born and feel odd calling someone I do not know "Aunt".

[HamdenRice]

34. Do I have a half brother?

When I was growing up, around the time of the Christmas holidays, a woman would call from Virginia, where my father was born and grew up. My parents would hang up on her. I never actually heard what she had to say but it was hinted that she called claiming that she was the mother of a son my father had as a very young man. My parents would call her "crazy." It's hard to explain, but my father just didn't seem to be the kind of person who would have had sex before marriage -- especially back in those days.

Around the time my father was dying of cancer, I received at my office, a letter from a young woman in Richmond, Virginia. She said that she was the girlfriend of a man who believed that he was the son of my father. She said that her boyfriend was extremely depressed because he didn't know who part of his family was and who his father was. She said that she didn't tell her boyfriend that she was writing to me, but asked that I help her put her boyfriend and my family in touch.

I didn't respond to the letter, but sometimes I wonder.

[Bullwinkle925]

35. Yes . . .

There was an aunt of mine whom everyone in the family *suspected* that she had become pregnant (we're talking in the 1940's) - unmarried - showed up at her Mother's home one day looking pregnant - but never, ever talked about it. She was the Prima Donna of the family and was never questioned. My family was very strange in their interactions with each other. She went on to marry and had one daughter. I always thought that it was unfair to my cousin if, indeed, she did have a brother or sister out there somewhere. My aunt has passed away and has carried this *secret* with her to her grave.

Also, I had a cousin who was serving in the Air Force (during Viet Nam) and was shot and almost killed by an FBI agent outside of a bar in Denver. We never really found out the entire story behind that.

:shrug:

[Nikia]

36. Not mystery but a few that I wasn't told about right away

Possibly because they did not think that such things were appropriate for children or that they were in serious denial. Sometimes they still repeat the official version even though they let the truth slip out.
My great grandfather (my grandmother's father) was a World War II vetran. He married realtively late and died in his early 50s when his children ages 4 and 8. I was always told that he died of complications of mustard gas, which was true to some extent. It turns out though that he wa a serious alcoholic and that contributed to his death as well.
My grandfather's brother was said to have died of cancer before I was born. It turned out that although he had cancer when he died, he blew his brains out on a mother's day.
My mother's cousin, who was the only cousin close to her age on her father's side of the family, was said to have disappeared with a guy who was a low class criminal. It turned out that she moved away from her family and did not have contact with them for several years when she introduced her middle class, non criminal girlfriend to them and they reacted badly. Fortunately, my great aunt and her husband were eventually able to accept their only child's sexuality and she moved back close to them several years before her father died.
If there any mysteries, I don't know about them. My grandparents always told lots of stories about themselves in their younger years, including stories about their parents and grandparents. I don't know if all those stories are true. Some evidently were not true.

[skygazer]

37. Kind of

I have an ancestor born in 1822 who disappeared when he was in his 21, telling his family he was going adventuring. A few years later, his uncle died and he stood to inherit a lot of money so the family started looking for him but even though they hired private investigators and offered rewards worldwide, they couldn't track him down.

Seventeen years after he left, he turned up at his mother's house. He told everyone he'd been in Africa and told all sorts of stories about the people he'd met and the things he'd done, none of which I can find a scrap of evidence for.

He settled down and ran a steamship for a number of years. He died off the coast of Oregon when the boat he was serving on went down in a storm.

He's such an interesting guy according to family lore but there's just no concrete information to verify any of the stories about him.

[Guava Jelly]

38. A family tree mystery

I cant verify the name of my great,great great,great grandpas first name so I am at a wall in my family tree research.
I hope to photograph a few old family graves in Pennsylvania when i head up that way in a few months.

[BrotherBuzz]

39. Yes, my great-grandfather's body was lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

He died just days before the earthquake and was in transit from Sonoma County to San Francisco for burial. The shipping company claims all paperwork was destroyed in the fire and they didn't know what happened to the casket. Grandma was just a child at the time, but she always told me she believed the casket was delivered properly, only to be stolen by an unscrupulous undertaker, and resold to another grieving family for a tidy profit. She believed her father's body was just tossed aside and buried in an unmarked grave. Grandma became a cynic early in life.

[Midlodemocrat]

40. Not in my family, but a friend's niece disappeared when she was 14.

Still missing. Her name is Doreen Vincent. She's on the Missing and Exploited Children Website.

Pretty creepy because it was almost 20 years ago.

[Saphire]

42. Ohhhh! I have one. I was looking at some county records (part of my job)

and just for S&G's I looked up my in-laws marraige certificate. I found it from 1964 when they were married, and I also found one from 1980 where my FIL married someone else! As far as I know my in-laws have never been divorced. So this second marraige is my mystery. I havent told my hubby anything about it yet.

[EFerrari]

45. Yes. One of my aunts turned up dead from arsenic poisoning

and while most of us believe her husband killed her, suicide has never been ruled out.

She was beautiful and smart and impulsive. Her husband was a jackass but, imho, had no reason to murder her. He could have just walked. :shrug:

I don't know that we'll ever know. Her only son is my favorite cousin.

[grasswire]

47. Yes, my grandpa may have been the real Music Man

Reportedly, composer Meredith Willson wrote "The Music Man" about a fellow he had heard about when the Sousa Band toured the Canadian provinces. The Music Man story, of course, revolves around a young man who starts boys bands in little towns.

My grandfather was a youthful trombone player in Saskatchewan when the Sousa band came through on tour. Family legend has always told how he took his trombone down to the bandstand (which he had helped to build, incidentally, as a carpenter) and actually was allowed to play with the Sousa Band.

His hobby then? Starting up bands for boys.

Of course in the movie, the Music Man is a bit of a reprobate. My grandfather was nothing like that, with a wife and young children.

I don't expect to ever know the answer.

[Patiod]

52. That's facinating.

didn't know it was based on a real person, no matter how different the fictional character was...

[judaspriestess]

49. yes

my uncle was murdered in San Antonio about 10 years ago. Tragic, not a bad guy at all. Just worked and did his thing. We suspect he went to a neighborhood bar maybe became intoxicated and came across someone who was a cold blooded killer. He was shot with a shotgun at fairly close range at a neighborhood park. No witnesses or at least none who want to talk. My grandmother died about two years later, she lost the will to live, so in essence that assholes(s) killed two people. May they rot in hell.

IMO forgiveness is not required of evil people.

[LynneSin]

50. Yes - how our dumbass, draft-dodging cousin could actually be elected 'president'

we're all baffled by cousin George.

[Arkansas Granny]

55. Yes. The oral family history is that my maternal great great

grandfather was taken from his home during the Civil War by his neighbors and hanged just a few miles from where I grew up because he would not take sides in the war. This is the story we've always been told, but we've never been able to document it.

[noonwitch]

56. My great-grandfather disappeared in the USSR.

My grandpa was told he went there to work, between the world wars.

The same man was married before he married my great-grandmother. His wife died suspiciously and the villagers tried to blame him for it, but he was protected by the army (the austrian army).

[distantearlywarning]

57. Grandmother "had to" get married

This is my incredibly conservative, Repuke-voting, fundie, thinks dinosaurs were put on earth by Satan grandmother.

While looking through old scrapbook albums once when I was a teenager, my mother and I discovered in a round-about way that my grandmother had been lying about her wedding date for over 50 years. It was actually a year later than what she and grandpa told everyone. Which means my father was born about 7 months after the wedding, instead of a year and 7 months.

She doesn't know we know this. But ever since that time anytime she starts lecturing about some moral topic or about sex before marriage or any of the other thousand things she acts all high and mighty about, my mother and I just smirk and think about what a dirty hypocrite she is.

Interestingly, my father didn't care at all about this news when we broke it to him. He just shrugged.

The grandfather she was married to also had a mystery, which I solved with the help of the internet last year. His family had been killed during the Great Depression (one illness, one suicide after bankruptcy), and he was turned out on the street as an orphan at age 10. Somehow he fell through the cracks and lost touch with his extended family. Thus we never knew anything about his father and mother or their ancestors, only their names. I got curious last year and entered his father's name (Z.S.) into a search engine, and was directed to a geneology site where a woman was asking for whereabouts of other relatives of Z.S.! I wrote her and it turned out she had no idea of the existence of my grandfather at all, although she knew all about his brothers and sisters, or that he had an entire family of children and grandchildren! I was also able to provide her with the name of Z.S.'s wife and a scanned copy of their wedding picture. In turn, she provided me with an entire documented family lineage prior to that point, which went back to English nobility in the 13th century and included people who were jailed for refusing to pay church taxes out of principle and Quakers who harbored runaway slaves on the underground railroad. I was thrilled to find out where some of my anti-authoritarian, progressive traits came from...

[PRETZEL]

58. when my grandparents passed away many years ago

I was down in the basement cleaning out the pantry and came upon this white sheet like thing wrapped in plastic. I took it up and to the disbelief that it was still in the basement was what we found out at the time was a Klan outfit. It appeared that at one time there was an active Klan orgainzation in Western PA.

Everyone expected it to be my grandfather's who had a very stern authoritarian personality. I think we were all more than a bit shocked when my aunt revealed that it was actually my grandmother's. She was as polar opposite from my grandfather as anyone I've ever met.

[rhiannon55]

59. My niece Angie disappeared under very suspicious circumstances almost 4 years ago

and nobody knows what happened to her. Well, someone probably DOES know, but no one in my family knows. She is (was) a sweet young woman who was very close to her mother (my sister), and this has been devastating. Click on the link in my sig line to see her picture.

[bridgit]

60. My grandfather was Capt of the vessel that came across: The Marie Celeste...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Celeste

[KG]

61. i have a great uncle that, in the 1920's, was found to have a wife in 2 different small towns

in the ohio coal belt. when confronted he declared he would leave town, and nobody would hear from him again. and that's just what happened.