Imagine those special family traditions that make you raise an eyebrow in curiosity, like the yearly pumpkin carving showdown that transforms into a fierce battle of imagination. And then there’s the age-old tale of a relative who possessed an uncanny knack for predicting the weather with uncanny precision. Prepare to hear from ordinary people who bravely unravel the eccentricities and peculiarities of their own families, sharing stories that range from delightful to utterly perplexing. These tales will make you appreciate the crazy, wonderful world that exists within our own family trees. It’s a wild ride you won’t want to miss!
My parents got divorced a few months ago because my father had a new girlfriend. Surprise, my mother’s now in a relationship with the ex-husband of my father’s new girlfriend. They basically exchanged partners.
If you wanna know, yes it’s weird at family gatherings.
My 80+-year-old grandparents got divorced because my grandma met an old flame of hers. they were in high school together. My grandma moved in with him and they seem happy. But my grandpa doesn’t know how to care for himself. He washed his own clothes for the first time at the age of 82 and he doesn’t really cook for himself so he lost a lot of weight.
My grandad was poisoning my nan’s tea with rat poison for ages. She was documenting it and told the police, they did a huge bust on him and arrested him in front of all their kids (including my mum).
In court, he admitted to it, he agreed to all the charges, and he did the deed. Eventually, the judge, flummoxed, asked: “… But why?” And his answer was “Because we agreed to it.”
Apparently, they had made an agreement to use rat poison to home-treat her deep vein thrombosis (this brand was basically a blood thinner so the rats couldn’t clot when they got injured, and they both distrust doctors). This woman is crazy and I fully believe my grandad’s side.
I placed my newborn for adoption (open adoption, chose the family myself). A few years later my sister got pregnant and placed her newborn with the same family. So the children are growing up as siblings and are cousins by blood. (This was over 20 years ago.)
My great aunt Rose was able to escape a concentration camp due to being a member of royalty in I cannot remember which exact country. After a few months in the camp, she became deathly ill and was left to die in an “infirmary”. This royalty was visiting the camp and saw her, asked her her name, and her occupation. Rose was an incredibly talented seamstress, and this person needed a Taylor at their estate. So they drew up some papers declaring her a Christian, convinced the Nazis that they had made a mistake, took her into their estate, nursed her back to health, and she spent the rest of the war making and fixing clothes for their family.
My grandmother was the nurse on duty when my mom went into labor. My grandma delivered me on her 50th birthday. (She was my best bud until she passed when I was 13)
My Grandpa. He was about 12 or 13 when he got to Shanghai. Food was scarce, living conditions were garbage, and the Japanese soldiers wouldn’t hesitate to kill you, especially if you were Jewish if you crossed them.
So for a long while, my grandfather was the only one in his family strong enough to work. His father was depressed and starving, and his stepmother had fallen ill. So he decided to be a runner and peddler of whatever goods he could get his hands on.
One day he came across a tin of rather old and stale English biscuits. He hadn’t eaten in a few days and was DESPERATE to make a bit of money to get food. So he sold the tin to a Japanese soldier.
The next day his buddy Fred (they stayed friends until My grandfather’s death in 89) approached him PANICKING and said that the Japanese soldier had been asking around for him. My grandfather accepted the fact that he was going to be killed and his body strung up as an example like so many he had seen before.
After saying his goodbyes to his friends and parents he went to find the soldier, as he wanted to face his fate head-on. He approached the soldier, who nodded to him and said, “Those cookies were some of the best I’ve had, do you have any more, boy?”
I’m 25 years old, and there hasn’t been a single day when my family has ever eaten together except at a festival. I’ve never even been on a vacation with my parents, not because we couldn’t afford it but because my parents’ careers always came first.
It’s creepy that my parents would rather go to the office and ignore their children.
My Grandpa had been visited by Bill Clinton in our small Arkansas town and asked him for campaign donations.
Back story.
My grandpa lived in Detroit and ran an illegal casino in a house. He did something for the people who had “ownership” of it and left town to my small town in Arkansas.
The day he died my dad received two letters. One from Governor Bill Clinton. Another from a Senator at the time. At his funeral, a man talked to my dad and expressed sympathy for his loss. Said they were good friends in Detroit. Dad never met him ever. He would, every year, visit the grave and add flowers and clean it up.
Both tend to disappear for weeks at a time and they claim it is for “business” but when I put a marker on my dad’s plane using Flightradar24.com, he told me he was going to La Guardia in NYC… that’s not where his plane went. It went to Seattle, he stayed there for a few days and then came back… a VERY short business trip in my opinion.
My mom has similar trips but only to her “headquarters” which is located in Wisconsin. I repeatedly ask what she does for work but no matter how many times she explains it to me, I can never understand and whenever she is on a “business call” I repeatedly hear her talking about things that are not at all related to her work. Things like politics, the economy, and social standings–none of which has anything to do with her job, by the way…
My parents encouraged my brother to learn Taikwando (which he practices religiously), Dad knows multiple martial art styles, and how to use almost every weapon he touches, and I figured that out the hard way a few times. When I was a teen my parents bought my (then 10-year-old) brother throwing knives and when we both asked how to use them, Dad took the knife, threw it, and buries it into a spruce tree 10 meters away!
same with a bat. I was once curious about sports so I asked him to buy me a baseball bat. I was practicing hitting pine cones (since we hadn’t bought a ball yet) and he said randomly out of the blue, “You know, if you ever need to defend yourself with a bat–,” he turned it around so I was holding the end and the pommel was forward, “hit them on the head with that end.”
good to know…
I’m convinced that my parents are training me and my brother to become the next generation of employees for some illegal company that specializes in m*rder but I can’t prove it. Maybe they’re just naturally suspicious.
For at least three generations, the women of my family have had very similar and eerie childhood experiences. It’s too weird and coincidental for it to not be connected, but I don’t think I’ll ever get any answers on this Earth.
My first memory is of me playing in the closet with wire hangers. I was wondering what would happen if I stuck it in my eye. So I did it. And I remember that my eye was bleeding and that I got it on the carpet. I remember seeing myself in the mirror before I passed out and thinking that it was over. But then I remember a man (can’t remember any details of his face or anything at all) who talked to me (can’t remember what he said), touched my face, and then I woke up and it was like it had never happened. My father thought it was my imagination, but my mom always believed that something had really happened, because it had happened to her.
When my mom was very young, she was cleaning a bookshelf when she found a shard of glass and I guess got curious and cut her eye open. She remembers that some guy (who she also can’t remember) talked to her and healed her. And that her eye was fine.
Then she told me that when her mom was little she cut her eye open (I don’t know how) and she remembers some guy talking to her and healing her.
It’s weird and has no real explanation. But it’s happened to at least me, my mother, and my grandma. I wouldn’t be surprised if it went back even farther than that.
My parents were married within six weeks of meeting each other, and they were both engaged to other people at the time. Bonus – My mom was a celebrity, and so was her fiance. She retired from show business fairly young, he was front page news the day he died.
My grandmother had 3 siblings and my grandfather had 6 siblings. They got married, then my grandma’s brother married my grandpa’s sister, then my grandma’s first cousin married my grandpa’s other sister, and then my grandma’s second cousin married my grandma’s third cousin. So there’s no incest but I have a whole, whole lot of double or triple cousins.
My sons, my dad, my grandfather, and I don’t get red-eye with bright flash photos, we get green-eye. Not deep green like a forest, but bright green light traffic light. I’ve asked optometrists about it, and I posted it on here a few years ago with some eye doctor that did an AMA; we’re just weird apparently.
My elderly grandmother had Alzheimer’s towards the end, and she had smoked for as long as I was aware. My grandfather always wanted her to quit, especially if we grandkids ever came around. The house never really smelled like smoke, they had air filters I think. So after deliberating for a while, my grandfather decided to play a trick on her, and when she was asleep he threw away all the cigarettes, ashtrays, and lighters in the house. When my grandmother woke up, she asked him where her cigarettes were. He replied to her, ‘Oh Mary, you quit smoking years ago, you must have forgotten.’ She didn’t even question the idea, admitted that she must have forgotten, and never smoked again.
My dad is in his 70s, and my mom is in her 40s. My mom was 19 and my dad was 49 when they got married. Had my sister a year later, me two years later, and my youngest brother three years later.
As a kid, I never realized how weird this was. I just found it silly that my teachers would tell me that my grandpa was there to pick me up from school when it was my dad.
My grandmother, who passed away just over a year ago, was a legend in her own right. I had a chance to sit down with her a few years ago and record an interview with her (it was for a linguistics class, and she had a distinct northern accent) in which she ended up telling me her life story.
She grew up on a farm, far away from the local schools. She would hitchhike with her sister every day to get to school. As she grew older, she decided to learn how to cook on the old stove…and ended up burning off her eyebrows when it exploded.
Being forced to find her own entertainment on the farm, she recalled often swimming in the lake nearby. One day, she discovered a moose had fallen into the lake and was struggling to get out, so she lassoed it and had it pull her around the lake—until her father found her. She got a scolding she remembered well over eighty years later.
She managed a sundry shop in an upscale hotel in later years and recounted the one rule she and her employees had to follow: never, ever go upstairs with the guests. One girl ignored the rule and was arrested for prostitution. My grandmother often visited her in jail.
Later she was a photographer in a dance hall (and was my best critic for my own photography) and a welder on the Liberty Ships. She lived with two Macy’s models, and referred to my grandfather during the courting days as “the little fat boy.”
About fifty years ago, when my mom was five years old, she and her mom (my grandmother) were walking in a department store. An old woman approached them, bent down to look my mom in the eyes, then turned to my grandmother and said, “You don’t know me, but I’m a witch. Your daughter’s name is Such and Such, and her birthdate is Such and Such. She’s a witch, too.” My religious grandmother was horrified and whisked her daughter quickly away.
When I was seven, a stranger approached my mom and me in the grocery store and exactly the same scenario played out. She told my mom my name and birthdate, and that I was a witch. I just thought it was a weird thing that a crazy old lady did, but a few years later my mom told me about the time it happened to her when she was younger.
I’ve never been able to get my grandmother to admit that something similar happened to her when she was a child, but the look on her face when I ask her about it convinces me that something did, in fact, happen to her and her mother as well.
My mother has two siblings, a sister and a brother. Her sister was struck by lightning once and was shaken up, but fine. Her brother was struck by lightning once, and was shaken up, but, fine. My mother has been struck by lightning twice, and both times, was shaken up, but, fine.
I have an identical twin sister whom I did not know about until a few weeks ago. Our biological parents were very poor and couldn’t care for two children so I was put up for adoption and she stayed with our biological family. We found out about each other because a coworker of hers that was essentially stalking her started following me around. It was a Sister moment except creepier.
One that stands out was the fact my grandmother got properly dressed upon waking up and changed her clothes three times a day. She dressed in the morning, served my grandfather breakfast, then changed when he left, did housework, and then changed again to serve him dinner. While didn’t wear anything elaborate, like an evening gown or anything, she wore “proper clothing” that would be seen as perfectly respectable to any visitor to their home or if she had to go out and go shopping. Proper shoes and all. Compare that to now where during the weekend, I am mostly in sweatpants and a tee shirt, and my wife often just has a tee shirt and no pants. In fact, among our friends, I would say that almost nobody gets dressed properly unless they plan to leave the house.
Another thing they did was all food must be served properly on table linens and from a serving tray, even after my mother had moved out and grown. Even after my grandfather retired. There was a certain decorum and routine they kept until my grandfather died at the age of 73, and even afterwards, my grandmother still kept it up: she’d make her meal, serve it to the dining room table, and eat alone. Eating in front of the TV or in bed was completely foreign to her.
Our dining room table seems to be used mostly to store things. It’s only cleared off and used for really fancy meals, like Thanksgiving.
My sister talked my ex-husband into suing me for full custody at the exact moment I was unable to contest it, properly because I had just suffered a huge loss at month 9 of my pregnancy. She also foddered his case with lies to make me look like a terrible mother, while simultaneously patting me on the back and consoling me that he was a terrible man.
He didn’t win, but the case made things contentious for us for years and made it impossible to grieve with my now husband because I was in survival mode to make sure I didn’t lose my daughter.
My family, over hundreds of years, has meticulously documented our family tree. Today, all of this has been bound in a book with my old family crest. It documents our family tree going back hundreds of years. The earliest entry documents my ancestor Thomas leaving England and coming to the new world at the turn of the 16th century. I have pictures of family reunions that have civil war veterans at them. Detailed information about my family members that lived hundreds of years ago. What they did and how they died. Photos of family members my grandparents didn’t even know that bare my last name and even, strangely enough, kind of look like me in some ways.
I think that is pretty rad. I feel like it is pretty rare to have a family history that well documented.
My husbands and my little sisters were best friends and in the same class during school. In middle school, they did a genealogy assignment. Come to find out my husband’s side of the family is descendants of Robert E. Lee while my family are descendants of Ulysses S. Grant. Now we joke we gave brought the North and South together by getting married.
Discovered this recently when both my grandmas were moved to a nursing home and we found their birth certificates. Both of them have been living under a different name than what is listed on their birth certificates. They are both roughly 90 and due to dementia, can’t explain it themselves. On my mom’s side, nobody else is alive that could possibly explain it and on my dad’s side, nobody else knows yet because we just discovered this a few days ago.
His crowning achievement, in college, has since become Illegal in two states.
Step 1: He and several buddies go to a Cadillac dealership at 5:00 on a Friday. This was before credit cards and automatic banking, btw.
Step 2: They wrote a check for the asking price of one of the shiny new models, and drove off with it.
Step 3: They sell the car at a used Cadillac dealership across town.
Step 4: The Used dealer calls the New dealer, and tells him that the car was sold with the dealer plates still on, and the price tag still in the window.
Step 5: New dealer figures that the check the kids wrote is going to bounce, so he calls the cops.
Step 6: My dad and his friends spend the weekend in jail.
Step 7: The banks open Monday morning. The check doesn’t bounce.
Step 8: My dad and his friends sue the dealers and the state for wrongful imprisonment, and get a settlement of thousands of dollars more than the cost of the car.
Basically, the plan was to seem as shady as possible and get wrongfully arrested for it. They had the lawyer set up before they bought the car. Dad used his share to pay for his, and another friend’s, tuition for the year.
The state passed legislation protecting themselves from this kind of thing within the month, and the state to the immediate north adopted the law as well, 30 years later.
My grandfather was born a preemie just as the first incubators were being made. And was one of the first babies to be incubated. He was incubated in a freak show on Coney Island.
My mother’s maiden name is a known mafia name in Italy. My great-grandfather (I believe, it may be a distant uncle though) was known to be involved and died when a car had jumped the curb, ran over him and sped off while he was leaving church.
Our family has been contacted a couple of times, specifically my uncle when he became a lawyer. My uncle was offered a very high-paying and very shady job for a new lawyer and he was told it was because of his name.
My mom was speaking to a chatroom group for Italians She had been asked what part of Italy her family came from and what her name was. When she mentioned the name she was blocked/banned from the group. That was about 15 years ago or so, so the name carried some weight back then, I don’t know about now though.
Everyone around me already knows that I was brought up by foster families because I had a sh*t early childhood. I deliberately keep it vague and say stuff like “I’d rather not go into it” so that people will just assume I was abused in some way and they’ll stop asking about it.
The truth is that for the first 7 years of my life, I was brought up as a girl by my psycho birth mother who really really really wanted a daughter and didn’t let the snag of giving birth to a boy stop her from trying to raise one.
She was a pretty successful professional in the legal field (not entirely sure what) and had me via an anonymous sperm donor from a fertility clinic. She found out I was a boy at a late ultrasound and then moved across the country. Gave birth to me at home and continued to move about until I was 5 or so. It was just the two of us all my life, we had contact with other people, of course, but they rarely got very close. I had lots of friends but was always supervised.
I found out way after that my mother’s strong puritanical Christianity was a lie she used to explain why she was so strict about me being ‘private’ and never letting anyone see me get changed or anything. I just accepted all of this as a fact, having never been told anything different.
I was sent to a religious school for girls and had a really great childhood. I was a bit of a tomboy, and played with Lego and toy animals, rather than dolls and stuff, but that’s not unusual and no one ever questioned I was a girl – even me. I knew about men and women but had never really seen much of n*ked people. my mother never ever spoke to me about it, but I kinda had the impression that when I grew up and got boobs and stuff, my d*ck would kinda fall off or something and I would be a woman, and other kids would be men. I dunno, to be honest, I never really thought about it
Anyway, I carried on with my happy girlhood and had a bunch of friends and everything was great until I was 7 and a teacher accidentally spilled a cup of hot coffee over me at school. the liquid soaked through my clothes and was scalding me so the staff immediately stripped me out of my dress and underwear to get the hot coffee away from my skin. And then they found out.
The cops were called and I got taken to speak with who I guess would be Social Services. they asked me a bunch of questions about life at home and stuff. meanwhile, my mother was taken in for questioning too. She refused to acknowledge me as male and insisted I was her daughter. because she was y’know, delusional and stuff, I wasn’t allowed to go back home but got put with a foster family and went through loads of therapy and stuff.
I always thought this was weird/cool. My mother has a few toes that are webbed on both of her feet. Her first child had no wedded toes. The middle child (myself) has just one foot with webbed toes. and my brother has both his feet webbed like my mom. Also, my mom has no idea where she gets her webbed toes from her family.
My “uncle” is actually my cousin. My aunt had him at 16. She knew she couldn’t keep him and wanted to put him up for adoption. My grandparents decided to legally adopt him and raised him as her brother. They only refer to each other as brother and sister. They act like there is nothing strange about it. It is harder for people outside of my family to accept.
My grandma didn’t drive. I thought she couldn’t, but it was just never discussed.
One day when I was maybe 7-8, I’d been trying to get someone, anyone to drive me to the store for candy. We were visiting my aunt and uncle, grandma lived with them. They had Bit-O-Honey at the local store, which I could no longer get at home. But no one would take me to the store.
Finally, I said I’d just ask Grandma, and my cousin chimes in with, “Grandma can’t drive.”
“Oh, you bet your sweet a** I can drive. They just don’t let me!” Grandma had overheard and she was in high dudgeon.
But that’s all that was said about it, and my aunt finally took me to the store, so I forgot about it.
Years later, when I’d just gotten my license, I asked my mom what was up with Grandma not driving.
She explained that during prohibition grandma boot-legged alcohol for moonshiners. She was very successful at it. She was so successful at it that when the moonshiners were finally busted, even though the revenuers never caught my grandma, her license was suspended by the state “to never be reissued.”
Later in life, she was told she could petition for it back but it came with an admission of guilt or some such. She told ’em to go to h*ll.
It was 1983. My dad was 30 and had just taken over his father’s jewelry store in my hometown. On March 20th, an 18-year-old girl comes in to buy engagement rings. The father of her now 1-year-old son is away on deployment in the Air Force, and when he gets back she’s going to surprise him by forcing him to marry her. This 18-year-old girl hangs around and looks at rings for a while, then comes back the next day and does the same. She does this again the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, each time staying in the store a little longer.
It’s now been 4 days since my dad met this girl. He calls her to ask for advice about a girl and says he wants to take this girl he knows out but can’t decide on lunch or dinner. My mom says if he wants to be friends, then lunch. If he wants to be more than friends, then ask her to dinner. He says “Okay great, thanks. So where are we going to dinner?”
6 days after their dinner date and 12 days after they met for the first time, on April 1st, 1983 (yes, really, April Fool’s Day) my dad marries my mom, who is 12 years younger than him and met him buying engagement rings to marry somebody else. They have 9 kids including the oldest brother and are still married.
When my sister was diagnosed with cancer and her survival chances were low, it inevitably came out that she wasn’t my sister… Parents must have felt we should all know the truth just in case.
She survived her treatment, and will always be my sister.
Growing up, my twin cousins and I always played at family reunions and weddings. I asked why their dad was never there and they talked about their dad being out of town all the time because he was a Plumber
I was little so I had no idea Plumbers don’t usually travel out of town for work
About 15 years later I saw my uncle and twin cousins at a wedding after never really seeing him much before. However, there was something very militant about his behavior. I mentioned it to my grandma in passing that he had a pretty crazy posture and was quite serious for a Plummer. She looked at me bewildered and laughed at me.
And that’s when I learned Uncle Jeff is retired CIA! Family Alias: Plumber
I’m named after a several-great aunt who was a spy for the Confederacy in the Civil War. She would hide her documents/evidence/etc in pockets in her skirts, and sometimes sewn directly into the fabric.
One day she got caught by the Union, but when they were about to search her, she demanded to be searched by a woman. They left her alone in a room while they went off to find a woman to search her, and while they were gone, she ripped all of the spy documents out of her skirts, and shredded it, eating some of it. When she was searched, they found nothing. She had a formal trial but was found not guilty because they had no hard evidence.
My wife was born in a car in the hospital parking lot. Her mother was born in a car in the hospital parking lot. Her grandmother was born in a car in the hospital parking lot.
This is why I’m studying obstetrics and have plastic in the trunk of my car. 🙂
My daughter was born on 07/07/07 at 7 minutes til midnight, weighing exactly 7 pounds. She was also the 7th grandchild of our family. We jokingly told people that we named her Lucky.
All the women down my mother’s line, as far as we can trace it, either divorced or separated from/kicked out their husbands, and all of them lived longer than their ex-husbands/separated husbands, according to church death records. My grandmother told me that her grandfather was a drinker. My grandmother’s husband was a drinker. My mother’s husband was a drinker.
I was always told by my Mum that The dog choose my Name. They laid out a bunch of cards with different names on and the one he went to was what they named me.
When I was about 12 my Dad let me on the secret that he rubbed chocolate on the back of the card with my name on it.
It wasn’t till I was about 20 that my mum found out.
My great-grandma and her siblings have full names that are only 7 letters long, including both first and last names (they didn’t have middle names).
This is because their mom had 7 names and her father made her write them on the chalkboard of the one-room schoolhouse in front of all the students to demonstrate proper handwriting.
She hated it so much that she gave her children the shortest names she could think of. The man she married had a last name of only 4 letters long so she gave all three of her children first names that were only 3 letters long with no middle names.
My grandfather was a brain surgeon. My grandmother met him as a nurse in the ER. She was dating another man at the time a motorcyclist, that’s important later. Well, my grandfather took an interest in her, and around the same time, her boyfriend got into a motorcycle accident. His injuries were bad enough to go to the ER for it, so he goes in, gets to my grandpa’s OR, and my grandfather says “I’m marrying [grandmother’s name]” and he walks out of the room. Never operated on him. They were married until she died.
