A friend of mine recently told me that she was the source of a rift in her family. This seemed very odd to me since this friend is a perfectly nice person—not the kind you’d expect would ever do anything to throw a family into crisis.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “How could that even happen!?”
As it turns out, while conducting genealogy research she had discovered that her great-grandfather had spent time in jail for killing someone. She shared this information on her web-based genealogy account and told family members. While some took it in stride, others were very upset to know this about one of their close ancestors, and even more upset that my friend had shared it on the web.
What family doesn’t have “secrets”?
I call them secrets. Some people call them skeletons. Others pretend they don’t exist. But they do, and every family has them. If you ever speak to someone who says they don’t, it’s simply because they haven’t really looked—or they have resolved their feelings about their family’s imperfections. Here are some other examples people might consider being a skeleton in their family’s history:
first cousins who marry
two brothers of one family marrying two sisters in another
a man marrying the sister of his deceased wife
an ancestor institutionalized due to mental illness
ancestors who participated in the buying and selling of enslaved individuals
infidelity
the product of infidelity
And the list goes on… In fact, it’s endless, because we tend to keep secret those things that we are ashamed of, and different people are ashamed of different things.
What’s in a secret?
If you happen to be working on your own genealogy research or writing your memoirs or a book about your family history, you may be wondering how to handle sensitive information.
The first step is to put the information in historical context. Take the example of first cousins who marry: this may seem a little close for comfort by our standards of today, but the reality was that communities were much, much smaller (especially outside of cities) and cousins marrying was not uncommon.
Similarly, a man who married his deceased wife’s sister wasn’t doing it necessarily because the sister had been his one true love all along. It’s more likely that he needed someone to run the house and take care of the kids, and it was a marriage of convenience more than anything else.
These examples feel relatively innocuous. What about more notorious issues, like an ancestor owning enslaved people? Or German families whose grandfathers were soldiers in World War II? These are very delicate and difficult issues that affect family dynamics and legacy.
How to share your family secrets?
Finesse and thoughtfulness are paramount when deciding how—and even if—to share your family’s secrets. Just as you may choose to expose your children to certain information as it becomes appropriate for their age, the same kind of thoughtfulness should go into revealing potentially upsetting information about your family’s story.
If you are writing a book about an ancestor whose life contains information that is likely to surprise the reader, you can prepare the reader in a number of ways.
Think about and resolve how you feel about the issue before you discuss it with others or write about it in your memoir or family history book:
If you are judging the ancestor harshly, think about why or why not.
Do you need to learn more about the issue itself and how prevalent it was?
Do you know how the issue impacted family members at the time it happened?
Offer the facts without judgment; not everyone reacts the same way to the same things.
Consider discussing the issue with certain individuals before they read the book.
I can say with confidence that all the writers who belong to the Biographers Guild of Greater New York have experience helping their clients think through these issues. What to reveal? How to reveal it? Should it even be revealed? That’s one of the benefits of working with a professional biographer who has helped clients capture their family’s stories compellingly, lovingly, and with great care for how each story is told.
If you have any questions about how to handle the skeletons in your own family’s story or how a personal biographer can help, be sure to reach out to any one of us.
Clémence Scouten, based in the Philadelphia area, helps people curate and preserve their family history stories and materials, providing an array of end products from archived collections to memoirs.