Are there any skeletons in your family closet?
Have you ever kept a secret from a loved one to be protective or by being economical with the truth?
These questions arose for me during the course of a weekend visit from my elder brother.
He has recently started researching our family tree; making use of online resources which are cleaner and probably more efficient than trawling through dusty parish register or visiting overgrown cemeteries.
He’s already uncovered the fact that my mom’s parents got married six months before she was born. Do the math!
Does she know this? Probably not.
At 84, does she need to know this? We don’t think so.
He’s also discovered that my late father’s estranged brother died in 1999 but has found no info on dad’s sister who cut herself off from the family.
To crown it all, we were talking over dinner about births, deaths and marriages and my sister-in-law asked when I had got divorced from my first wife. An innocuous enough question except for the fact that my 16 year old daughter was at the table and I had never told her that I had been married once before!
It left me feeling guilty that I hadn’t been open about my personal history but take some comfort from the fact that my daughter is more preoccupied with the now to be bothered much by questions of ancestry. It might even make her look upon me as a ‘real person’ rather that just ‘Dad’.
