They'll be spinning in their graves --

[Annie65115]

My great-grandmother was pregnant when she married Tom and went on to have 2 children, the younger being my grandmother. The marriage broke up around the time of my grandmother's birth in 1905; Tom was apparently abusive, went off with other women, gave her "a disease"    and left town. She found work, and a roof over her head, with a pub landlord (Sam) and in time they fell in love. In 1914 she tried to divorce her husband so that she and Sam could marry -but the judge wouldn't allow the divorce,even though it was uncontested. She and Sam nonetheless stayed together for the rest of their rest of their lives, he brought up the children and although she and the children used her "official" married name on documents, they used Sam's surname in daily life. My grandmother called Sam her father, and my mother knew him as her grandfather, but always felt there was a undercurrent of story that she hadn't been told.

So when I discovered all the above, we thought the skeletons were out of the closet and we had at last identified my grandmother's lineage.

Wrong!

DNA has now shown that in fact Sam (and not the husband) is my biological great grandfather! So Tom wasn't the only errant partner in that marriage, and my gt-grandmother and Sam clearly got together a lot earlier than anyone would admit to 

Photos show that my grandmother's older sister was the spitting image of Tom, but the two sisters look nothing whatsoever like each other 

That whirring sound in the background must be the noise of them all spinning in their graves, now that this has come out!

[BillyF]

It would never have been imagined at the beginning of the 20th century that DNA would let all the secrets out!!

[Stanwix England]

It's fascinating finding stuff out like that isn't it.

Studying genealogy has totally transformed my perspective of the past. I always bought into the idea that pre-marital sex was invented in the 1960s! But from what I've found out about my ancestors, that certainly was not the case. Babies out of wedlock and relationship breakdown was very common.

I wish I could remember which one it was, but I read a biography of a kitchen maid who became a house keeper in the late Victorian/early Edwardian era. She went home to visit her Mum one day, only to find that her father had left her for someone else. Apparently her Mum thought they'd done pretty well, as that had happened to lots of her friends years before. The stress of poverty I imagine was a big factor.