In this bonus episode we hear from listeners in the Family Secrets community.
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Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. As I tore the nation from my book Inheritance, I've heard from so many about your own family secrets and realize that what we are creating for each other on this podcast is a community, a community for those who are looking for a safe and supportive space to unburden themselves. To that end, we've created a number for listeners to call in to record stories to share here in this space. This week, I'd like to share a few of those stories from our community. Thanks for listening. Hi, I have let to podcasts no one to leave my family secrets. In brief, it's kind of two different secrets, but kind of revolved around the same people. I lost my dad in May of two seventeen, and ten months later my mom was killed. Um my dad overdosed, which had been his own personal secret. We actually to know he was even using. There were no signs, nothing. And then ten months later my mom was actually hit by a car while she was walking on a sidewalk and killed, and it kind of opened up big secrets in my mom's side of a family that almost everybody that had died before I've known were killed in strange ways. I have great uncles that were struck by lightning, and another one was killed by a snowmobile. Um ones that drowned. It seems like in my family, you don't really live past the age of sixty, and you die in really strange ways. Then I never knew about it till my mom passed, and then on my dad time. UM his dad, so my paternal grandfather I'd only met three times in my life, but when my dad died, I felt like I need to reach out to him, just to let him know that his son had passed. And UM, I knew he lived in the same city, and so my mom and I before she passed, did some research and tried to find him, and we cannot find him anywhere, and we don't know what happened to him. And then we found out that his girlfriend moved to Texas and I ended up finding her phone number and calling her, and she's actually has some sort of dementia and they she said he was put into a nursing home for alcoholism and has dementia too, and she can't remember what nursing home he was put into. So at this point we're still trying to look into it. And I was always told that his family there wasn't anybody else. And then I come to find out that actually my paternal grandfather had six siblings, and now I did my ancestry DNA and I actually connect it with one of my second cousins on that side, and it turns out that I have probably another like family members through there that I've never met, and we're all starting to reconnect. And so that's pretty much where my story is right now. Thank you, bye, good morning. I had an interesting experience occur last week and then listening to your podcasts since it began and has been enjoying very much all of the stories of all the different types of secrets families came from keep and completely unaware that there was a family secret in my life. And I got a phone call, ironically while I was listening to one of your podcasts from my uncle asking me for the photos of my mother had before she passed, of the known family my grandpa had, which was to sisters. The story had always been that he had been left in Missouri, that he had a mother, my great grandmother, Um had contracted tuberculosis and had gone off to the Southwest. His father ended up um an alcoholic and was incapable of taking care of his youngest son. So his oldest daughters, my great aunts, took their little brother, my grandpa, and moved to Oregon. And that was always a story I grew up around. My whole family were very, very close. I thought there was no secrets, And I got a phone call from my uncle asking for these photos of the hierarchy, saying that he had just gotten a phone call film a cousin he didn't know he had. And turns out my grandpa had a live being mother and father and two brothers. That we're all living within a hundred miles of us my entire life. And it made me think of a time that I was about nineteen years old and in a town different than the one I had grown up in, and a young man walked by me and he looked just like my cousins. So I called from my cousin and this man turned around and was not him. And I never mentioned the last name. I'm kind of wishing I had now because I believe that was probably one of my great uncles kids or grandkids that could have been a cousin. And I had no idea. None of us had any idea, And there's over a hundred and sixty of us. So just when you think your family can't hide anything, coplomo, everything changes. Hi. I stumbled on the family secret by accident. Um All I had meant to do was fact heck mom's family story to figure out why she'd been such a critical mother to me. I figured that something must have happened to her when she was a child that had traumatized her and perhaps made her unable to be emotionally supportive. Maybe it was because her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic. So I requested grandma's patient record from the state hospital where she had been a patient for over a decade. When I got my hands on it, the secrets just spilled out. Three other women in Grandma's family had also been patients there, and I got their records to her sister, her mother, and her mother's sister. I had two generations and records full of the social history of the family. The most shocking secret was the Grandma had been sexually abused by another member of the family, her aunt's husband, right around the time that Mom was born. When I found this out, I had just retired from a career as a research librarian. So I did what a librarian naturally does. I followed the clues in Grandma's record, and I visited the homes where she had lived and the cemeteries where my ancestors were buried. I took a DNA test, and I determined that Grandpa was not Mom's biological father. I found cousins I never knew I had, and some of them were accepting of my discoveries, but others were not. Um I just finished writing a book about what happened in Mom's family. I feel like the trauma of the past has been passed down to my generation, and the only way that I can stop that from continuing to happen is to bring the story to life. I think there's a lesson in my family story that can benefit others, and that's also why I think a podcast such as yours is so important, So I want to thank you for doing it. If you'd like to share your story, call one eight eight eight secret zero and record your story. We won't be able to run all the stories, but we do want to shine a light on as many as we can. The number again is one eight eight eight Secret and then the numeral zero for more podcasts for my Heart Radio