Be Careful Going Through Old Family Photos and Letters

My mom passed away over two years ago, and my father just left her papers and possessions where they were when she passed.   After 60 years of marriage he basically just checked out of his old life after she died, leaving clean-up to his kids.  So I ended up with a box full of her jumbled photos and letters, mostly items from when she was growing up in the 1940s and 50s.  She was pretty good about putting our family photos in albums, but she never got around to sorting out the distant family pictures and letters from before she was a mom.

I have duteously been cataloging them, mounting them and making a family history and album.  I am using Ancestry.com as an aid, creating family trees and using that to group photos by family branches, and it is all coming together quite nicely.  By placing a tree in the album to give reference, then placing photos for only that part of the tree, labeling who is who, and adding commentary and family lore, the photos become a story, and a lot more interesting than random photos without reference.

But going through these letters and photos I am coming across family secrets.  Or things that were secret in my family as, personally, I don’t think these revelations are that big a deal, but they apparently were back in the mid 20^th century.  So far I have found out:

•  One of my first cousins has a different mother than her two siblings!  It was presented to me growing up that this uncle, aunt and three kids were from one family, but turns out my uncle was married before, had a kid, divorced, remarried and started having more kids.  But then the first divorced wife died, and the first kid was raised with the new kids under one roof.  So it’s a blended family – no big deal – but this is news to me, and I am in my 50s and this cousin is pushing 70.  Do I tell her I know, or just go along with the story?  Her biological mother died when she was pretty young, and I am sure she thinks of her step-mother as "mom" anyway.  
  
  
•  One of my aunts had TWO previous marriages before the marriage to my uncle (with whom she had three kids).  No kids were produced from these marriages, so no big deal, but a bit of a shock as I went through the letters and photos.  One was a super quick marriage around WWII (war bride) that did not last long, and she was widowed the second time (a letter to my mother mentions his cancer treatments).  I actually don’t know if my cousins - her kids - know about these marriages, and I am not going to bring it up since if no one told them, it is not my place to do so by finding the information in my mother’s old memory box.
  
  
• My mother had several first cousins that were living within short driving distance when I was growing up, and I didn’t even know this branch of the family existed.  Now you could say not everyone is close to their first cousins, but my mom lived with them during WWII as a kid while all the men were wrapped up overseas or in the domestic war effort.  And just a few decades later these cousins she lived with and their families lived within miles of us when I was growing up, and no holiday gatherings, meals, visits, anything.  In the meantime we were off visiting my mother’s siblings’ families and my first cousins all the time.  Was there a falling out?  Just grow apart?   Everyone is dead, so I will never know what happened, but I feel kind of cheated as I feel close kinship with my first cousins, and it seems this was a lost opportunity to have expanded that to second cousins.

 Thankfully the pile is now sorted, so there are no more secrets to uncover.