Until I was almost ten years old, I did not know my mom had a sister. One Christmas a card arrived and I asked my mom who it was from and she said "Your aunt." and left it at that. In later years I heard from my mom that Aunt Barbara had "dumped" her two illegitimate children on my grandparents and then took off with some new guy and wasn't heard from for years. This all happened when my mom was fairly young and I've always wondered if there was more to the story. At the reunion I had a chance to sit down and talk with Aunt Barbara privately. Tactless person that I can be, I just asked her what the story was and here's what she told me.
She took up with the town ne'er-do-well when she was 15. She had two kids with him within three years, then he robbed someone at gunpoint and was sent to prison. She moved home with the kids for a time, then met the man who was to be her husband, took the kids, and they all moved in together. She says that she came home from work one afternoon and found her husband "messing" with her young daughter and it was after that that she took the kids to my grandparents' house. She and her husband then travelled around the country for about twenty years (he worked in construction and poured the concrete for most of the missile silos in the Midwest). During the time that her kids were with my grandparents, their father got out of prison and tried to get the kids back. My grandparents managed to get the kids put into an orphanage rather than have them turned back over to their father. The kids stayed in the orphanage for 2 years, then the father got sent back to prison for shooting someone and my grandparents petitioned for and got custody of the kids. The next day I asked one of my older uncles about it and he told the same story, in fact he went with my grandparents to get the kids out of the orphanage and said "They was like wild dogs when we got 'em back."
How, in my mom's mind, this got turned into the kids being "dumped" on her parents is not entirely clear to me. My mom is cordial to her sister but there is still an underlying tone of bitterness when she speaks of her privately. I think maybe she just resented two more mouths taking up what little food there was in that house. And I completely understand that. I would like to tell my mom what Barbara told me because I think she really doesn't know.