I know a family whose mother had various kids by 3 different fathers. She was apparently an appalling neglectful mother and died in her 60's due to self neglect. All the kids attended her funeral except one who told me that she couldn't be so hypocritical having been treated utterly terribly by her. The subject came up in a conversation with a female friend who was very close to me at the time. Said friend came up with "the mother probably did the best she could in the circumstances". I was astonished at that remark to say the least but it came out that (no longer) friend had been very violent towards her own children who now have absolutely nothing to do with her. I suspect it is a lot more common than we think.
A few years back, I was doing some genealogy and got a lot of help from a local-ish woman via email, who someone had steered me to as we descended from the same (large) farming family. She had a really common surname, one many people I grew up with have, so I didn't realise at first but slowly, as we emailed back and forth (she had some great photos to send me of mutual ancestors) it dawned on me she was a woman I had grown up 2 doors down from.
And the thing was, my mum had loathed her. So we had little to do with them. The dislike was mutual.
They had never, when my mum was alive, known they were related.
My great grandma had been abandoned as a child. She had feckless parents, a farm labourer and his wife. It was a second marriage for my great great grandad and he had a slew of kids from marriage 1, then a slew of kids from marriage 2. He kept them all. Except one. My great grandma was born when first wife was still alive but he must have already been seeing the woman who became wife 2. Anyway, wife 1 died and he married his girlfriend. And sent my great grandma, still a baby, off to live with her older half brother.
Only my greatgrandma was dumped on an older brother to bring her up, 30 miles away in a city. The brother and his wife treated her like a slave and when she hit adulthood, she ran away back home where she married a fairly prosperous farmer (my great grandad). She had been illegitimate. The first child born to the second wife, when my grt grt grandad's first wife was still alive. So in this massive load of kids, only my great grandma was illegitimate.
She never spoke to her birth family again, except one time. When her father died, she was now married to my great grandad, living on the farm, had her own happy family and one night one of her brothers turned up on the doorstep, and told her her dad had died and did she want to go to the funeral. She told him essentially to eff off - her dad had never bothered with her when he was alive, why should she go to the funeral - and slammed the door in his face. From what I was told, the brother didn't even get to step foot inside the farmhouse.
There was no memory of any of this in our family - but the kids from the second marriage all remembered their sister/half sister and how she'd told one of them to go stick it where the sun don't shine and refused to go to her dad's funeral. This would have been the 1920s or so but they were still going on about it in that side of the family in the 1960s, I was told.
And this old neighbour of our's turned out to be the grand-daughter of one of the estranged brothers. So a close relative of my mum. (She'd lived 2 doors down from us for decades but they rarely spoke and when they did, the subject of who their grandparents were must have never come up!)
Ex neighbour was nothing but lovely to me by email. We'd been chatting quite a while before I realised she was Mrs J. The local family history society had put me on to her. But when I first emailed her didn't even know she came from the same village.
The old neighbour told me whenever they went past the farm they'd say that was where their rich relatives lived who'd have nowt to do with them. They were all farm labourers. My abused and abandoned great grandma none of them had lifted a finger to help, ended up with the big Georgian farmhouse and 100 acres... She turned into some mythic figure amongst them, the old neighbour told me. They admired her too, oddly, that she'd told them to stuff it.
Meanwhile, my mum never even knew any of these relatives existed... Her grandma must never have mentioned them at all. I even found mention of my great ggrandma's dodgy dad in a little local history monograph. The writer quoted someone describing him as "a right little villain" lol. He seems to have been well dodgy. His brother was York's chief of police in the 1880s! My mum did vaguely know she had some relatives/uncles who were "policemen" but that was all she knew. In fact, my prosperous farmer great grandad was briefly a copper too, we only recently found out. Til he returned to farming.
We only realised my great grandma had been born in a workhouse when I got on Ancestry and then saw her in the city, not at home, and realised her mother went on to have loads more kids after her, but never recalled her home. I can't imagine how it must have felt, being the only illegitimate one in a vast family, at a time when that was looked down on. Then dumped by your entire family. Then asked to go to the funeral of your dumper.
It turns out my great great grandad, though was a proper villain who also abandoned one of his children but kept all the rest. I only "know" him through the genealogy I've done (my mum never mentioned him), and stumbling on that snippet about him being a crim in the local history book (it was quoting the letters of someone from his village who appears to have been his landlord - apparently he'd con locals out of large sums of money then never pay it back). But I did get a really bad feeling about him, even so, like one of the wrong uns we talk about here.
