Balqis posted:

My dad's family is old southern baptist, so a lot of things only come out of the woodwork when you do a bit of genealogy research. One of the few things I did know growing up was that my great granddad was basically a drunk shithead who chased my clubfooted grandma and would beat her if he caught her as a form of therapy. I guess he hoped that she'd somehow stop being crippled? Anyways, she hated him and I'm pretty sure everyone was happy when he died an early death. She also was a strict teatotaller from that day forward, which I can't really blame her for.

But from there things get a bit more hidden. Like, her husband, my granddad, had an aunt who was apparently murdered as a young girl when she was walking to school in the late 1800s. A black guy got lynched for it. I (and my dad) only found out about it after my grandparents died when I was doing genealogical research. Besides a weird census record and an old newspaper article that got microfilmed, I never would have known about it.

My mom's side of the family is less interesting; in fact, some of the tame poo poo I do is something of a family secret because my grandma freaks about things like having 1) two completely platonic male friends as roommates and b) running off to Florida for spring break to meet a guy you like online. However, she had a grandma who everyone described as "half Indian". I dug a little into genealogy and found out that both her listed parents were bone white, but that she had to have been born when her mom was 13 and unmarried. So, its kind of a mystery. The one thing I dug up suggested that the father was from Oklahoma, so he could have been Indian? We don't know. Anyways, its just funny that my great great grandma gets invoked constantly as the charming Indian lady of the family - "you're 1/16th Cherokee, Balqis!" - but you have to know that when she was born, she was a huge loving scandal that no one talked about.

Oh, and then there's the prerequisite "family used to own slaves" thing, to the point that one ancestor wrote a phrenology treatise about the inferiority of the African race using his own slaves as specimens, but, you know, no one is ashamed of that.