Finding Skeletons While Doing Family Research

I started researching my family history for a variety of reasons. One of them was that I wanted to know where I came from and another because I wanted to meet more of my family. I didn't expect to find literal skeletons in the family closet though, or to understand why my mom acted the way she did.

When I began researching, I had very few family names to go on. I went to geneaology websites and had no luck. Then I Googled and hit pay dirt- an online list of my mother's family took up a single webpage. There wasn't anything else on it- not even the name of who put it on the internet.

Then I was not sure that I found the right family after I looked at the list. It said that my grandmother, the woman I called mom because she raised me, had two brothers and one sister where I only knew of one brother and one sister. So I called my Aunt Bee, on my mother's side, and asked about the difference so I could confirm if I had the right family. There wasn't anyone else I could ask because our family is so cold and distant from each other, and when we aren't we are mean and fired up.

Talking with my aunt, I was able to discover not only the reason for the extra name but why mom had not been affectionate towards us children. When my mom had been a young girl, she was left to care for her infant brother while her mother was out in the garden. Through natural circumstance- SIDS or something similiar- the baby boy had stopped breathing and died. At some point she discovered this and she carried the lifeless baby to her mother and told her the baby wasn't breathing.

The mother went slightly crazy- past the point of hysterics I suspect. She told her young daughter that she must have done something to kill the baby or cause its death. That it was all her fault the baby boy was dead. She was never forgiven by herself, she never got over the baby's death and she never was really absolved by her mother.

My Aunt Bee said mom never was what you would call affectionate to even her own birth children. To me she wasn't affectionate unless she was going into the hospital and was afraid that she wouldn't come out alive. But after we got to talking, then we figured it must have been the effect that the blame for her brother's death had on her.

When I started the family history research I never would have thought that I would find a skeleton. But I am glad I did because it gave me insight into the family I already had. I wish that the insight would have come sooner when I was much younger.