I didn’t expect to be writing about family stories so soon after last week’s post, but I’ve experienced a bit of a convergence of issues over secret, missing, or withheld family stories and their effect on descendants.

I just finished reading a new novel, The Lake of Dreams, by Kim Edwards, author of the popular The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. In the novel, a young woman stumbles upon information that prompts her to track down a hidden family story. A family member from three generations before is never spoken of and unknown in the family history, largely because she was a suffragette who went to jail several times.

The young woman protagonist is angry that this family story has been withheld. She particularly feels that knowing more about the secret ancestor would inform her own life.

I questioned the realism of the protagonist’s feelings. Would someone really be that upset over not knowing about a relative from three generations ago?

I could conduct my own reality test because I have two such stories from roughly the same era as the book’s missing ancestor. I linked to these stories in last week’s post; here they are in capsule form:

On September 11, 1913, a local justice of the peace in New Jersey disappeared, never to be seen again. The man, Walter Scott Fenimore, left a wife and four children behind. At the time he disappeared, he was in possession of $500 in bail money. The money was connected with a sensational case involving the shooting of a National Guardsman, allegedly by a chauffeur who cited the attentions of the Guardsman to the chauffeur’s wife. It was the chauffeur’s bail money that disappeared. Walter Scott Fenimore was my great-grandfather (my maternal grandfather’s father).

In 1922, a beloved New Jersey educator, Henry Neal, died suddenly at age 55. He had been a teacher, a principal, and a superintendent of schools in school districts in and around New Jersey. His wife, Grace, was so undone by his death that she lost her mind and spent the rest of her life in an insane asylum. The exact nature of her mental illness is unknown, but it seemed to have been some sort of catatonic state as she was not able to recognize her own children. Grace Neal was my great-grandmother (my maternal grandmother’s mother). [Pictured at left, my great-grandmother Grace Neal, right, holding my grandmother, Elizabeth Neal.]

In the case of my great-grandfather, no one withheld the story — subsequent generations knew about his disappearance — but Fenimore himself “withheld” his story by disappearing without a trace. His descendants can be annoyed, but only because we are driven crazy with curiosity over the tantalizing mystery of what became of him.

Grace Neal’s story, however, was withheld to a certain extent. My mother did not know until she was 18 that she had had a grandmother. She found out when she saw her grandmother’s grave in a cemetery. My mother’s mother — Grace’s daughter — apparently found her mother’s story too painful and perhaps too shameful to tell.

I have not been especially bothered by the missing history of Grace Neal, but my sister has. She has conducted significant research, trying to learn more about the nature of Grace’s mental illness and what her treatment was like in the insane asylum.

I still find the emotions of The Lake of Dreams protagonist a bit overblown, but I can relate to them to a small extent based on the shrouded stories in my own family history.

The other converging item about hidden family secrets was Oprah’s announcement Monday that she has a long-lost half-sister. Oprah, says her Web site, “received some news about her family that she says shook her to her core. ‘[It’s] a bombshell family secret that left me speechless.’” Oprah’s mother had never told her other children that she had given up a baby for adoption:

“I had no idea that my mother had given up a baby in 1963,” Oprah says. “I was 9 years old at the time, living with my father in Nashville, and didn’t even know my mother was pregnant … So imagine my shock just a few months ago. It was the end of October, right before Thanksgiving, [when] I found out that I have another sister living just 90 minutes away in Milwaukee.

Now, I would definitely be upset if the story of a sibling’s existence were hidden from me. This convergence of events may illustrate that the greater the generational distance, the easier it is to cope with the discovery of hidden family secrets.

What about you? Did you discover a family secret had been hidden from you? How did you feel?