My father’s side the family is full of quite influential people, from important contributors to the creation of America to the inventors of the first airplane, the Wright Brothers. However, his family also has multiple scandals woven into their interesting family tree, and my father did not know of this particular story until his high school friend told him about it.
My father is from small town Indiana, where the population was about 1,000 people and everyone knows each other. His high school friend Julie worked in a small grocery store which her family owned. This is also where my dad’s Great Aunt Martha worked; he called her Aunt Martha. Yet one aspect about Aunt Martha had always confused my dad. She had a son, yet no husband. Like any curious kid, my dad asked about her husband and where he was, and the story he was told was that “Martha’s husband died a long time ago, many years before [my dad] was born.” Little did my father know that this story was only part of the truth.
One day after school, my dad and Julie were hanging out and talking about his Aunt Martha. Julie asked him if he knew the story behind Martha’s husband. Well, my father said that Mike had passed away many years ago, to which Julie said, “no, the whole story?”
He replied no, and she proceeded to tell him the full story.
Back in the 1930s, Aunt Martha and her family were going to take a family trip up to Chicago. Martha was around 29 years old at the time and single. On this trip, Martha became pregnant. Now, this was in the 1930s, where that sort of thing was frowned upon. So, “[one of the families] told this man, he had to either join the army or marry my Aunt Martha.” He did both; he married Martha and enlisted in the army. However, after joining the army, he never came back.
Recently, my dad has done some genealogy research to try and find this guy, but there is no record of him joining the army in the 1930s or in the 1940s census, even though he was listed in the army during World War II. He says “maybe he lied and said, I joined. I married her. I’m joining the army and I’m never coming back.” Martha had always said that her husband had died and the family had never said anything different. However, by the time my father was old enough to ask about Martha’s husband, he had truly died. It wasn’t until his friend Julie told him the full story that he finally learned the truth behind this family scandal.