These are 15 crazy family secrets people only learned after someone died

“A few weeks after my mum died, my sister and I spent a day going through her possessions. My mum was very, very religious and there were a number of rosaries and various religiously themed pamphlets. My dad, who was still deeply bereaved, was kibitzing our activities in case we were trying to throw out something she really treasured. We found a few inconsequential documents along with a slender bound book with an older binding in the corner of her dresser drawer. I glanced at it and immediately put in the “toss” pile. My dad said, “No! Don’t throw that out!” I said it wasn’t something we needed to keep. He insisted, “No, it’s a prayer book! I’m sure it is! Hand it over!” I said, “OK, if you want it.” It was all I could do to keep from guffawing, but I could hide my laughter more than he could hide his red face. It was a 1940s-era sex manual. Can I get an “Amen?””  – Anonymous via quora.com

“My father always said that he had joined the Navy in order to avoid being drafted into the Army during the Korean War, but had done his best to get out of serving in the military at all. I had always been under the impression that he’d been a goof-up during his tour of duty, so much so that he’d gotten some sort of compassionate discharge halfway through his tour to go home and take care of his sick mother because his superiors were sick of dealing with him. Imagine my surprise to find his actual discharge papers and other military papers and [find] out that not only had he served his entire tour of duty, but he’d served with honours and gotten a couple of promotions to the point that he’d even had a bit role in a Stars & Stripes puff piece on Navy cooks and in fact had even been called back on duty. He had talked about some of his military service, about the goony birds on Midway Island and snorkelling in the lagoon there and how the military had buffed him up and so forth, but nothing about his actual duties. I still don’t understand why he let everybody around him think he’d been a goof-up in the Navy, but now that I know the truth I can see him in a different light.”  – Bad Tux via quora.com

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“I found out my mother’s middle name was Marie, not Mary as I had always been told. Both my sisters were supposed to have been named after her – Mary is the first name of my younger sister and middle name of my older. So why not Marie? I’ll never know. She is also a year older than she claimed – I’m guessing she did that because my dad was younger. We were told he was one year younger, but he was actually two years younger. I’m not even sure my dad knew – Mum never drove, so didn’t have a driver’s licence. She was an army nurse and I found her date of birth in her military paperwork.”  – Jackie Lynn via quora.com.

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“My father had a substantial collection of papers and letters he had saved over his life. Inspecting the contents of one dusty box, I found a letter he had written to an old college chum shortly before the outbreak of WWII. I’ll paraphrase it here:

‘What I envision is a network of phone lines connecting our offices in major US cities. Our customer dictates his correspondence into a recorder. The recording is played back at high speed over the phone lines. At the receiving end, another recorder running at high speed captures the message. The transcriber at the receiving end then plays back the recording at a slower speed, and types the letter or message for delivery by courier or local mail to the recipient.’

This idea was pretty radical, for its time. Nothing came of this enterprise, one among many which emerged from Father’s creative mind. But I realised that what it anticipated was the same utility as the FAX machine, which came many years later.”  – John Geare via quora.com

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“With my grandparents, also very kind, loving, honest people, we got the shock of our lives. While writing a genealogy book about my ancestry, I reviewed the final will and testament for each of my four biological grandparents. They were all happily married to each other to the end. But I was shocked to learn that all four grandparents had previous marriages, every single one of them! My parents didn’t even know! They kept it from the family, the fact that they were all on their second marriage. They took it to the grave, but I found all the evidence in their wills. And not many people were getting divorced during the 1930s, making it even more unusual.”  – Peter Wade via quora.com.

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Source: RD.com