14 people share the family secrets they only found out as adults

Everyone's got a weird family story up their sleeve, right? I recently found out that my surname is just totally made up. Yep, my distant relatives had a pretty bad reputation in their town (read: they were all criminals) so my grandfather just plucked Gilmour out of thin air to disassociate himself from the hooligans we're actually related to. But that my friends is NOTHING compared to this lot...

1. My grandmother has all the dirty little secrets but she's too proper to spill anything. Until this one night when she told me about my grandfather's (her husband's) family.. Essentially they were poor, living off the streets and trying to earn money during Australia's gold rush. Anyways, the family had too many kids and not enough money so they sold one of their kids to a Chinese businessman. [Via]

2. The only reason my family is in California instead of New York is because my dad's father wanted to follow his mistress (which nobody knew about until he died) to California, so he uprooted his entire family and made them move over here. [Via]

3. My late uncle was a psychopath who killed a homeless guy in the 1980s for no reason. He stood trial, but was acquitted because there supposedly wasn't any evidence. [Via]

4. I found out over Christmas whilst doing a family history search online that my dad had fathered two children by a different woman about 20 years ago. Side note - he and my mother have been married for over 35 years. [Via]

5. My uncle was pissed at my dad once, and decided to poke holes in all of his condoms. He was dating my mother at the time, and that is how I came about. I wasn't supposed to know, but my uncle told me once when he was drunk. [Via]

6. My dad joined the military because his parents found out about his cocaine problem and kicked him out of their house. Only found this out because my mum told me when I was in high school. [Via]

7. Thought my parents divorced just as a mutual agreement but my father had an affair. He was a cop and slept with his partner's wife. [Via]

8. My step great grandmother killed my biological great grandmother by pushing her off a building, everyone thought she was drunk because it was some rooftop party back in the 20s. [Via]

9. Great grandma had an affair with a clown. An actual clown. And there was some question as to whether my grandpa was the son of said clown. [Via]

10. My grandfather paid for his (early) schooling by fist-fighting in an underground fight club. I learned this last year from my grandmother during a heated argument between my mum and her about my school's tuition. [Via]

11. My dad was missing two of his fingers since before I was born. I was always told it was an accident while using a saw. Turns out he purposely did it himself to try and get some sort of insurance payout. [Via]

12. My grandfather was quite the ladies man and one night was cheating on my grandmother in his car in some parking garage thing (this is in the 60s I believe). The exhaust from the car killed them while they were getting busy in the back seat and my grandmother found out while she was watching the news at home while pregnant with my mum. [Via]

13. My great great uncle is Maurice Denning who was public enemy number 1 back in the early 1900s. Most of my family thinks its a dark secret but I personally think that it's pretty cool. [Via]

14. One of my aunts is married to the man that murdered John Lennon. [Via]