What family secret was finally spilled in your family?

That my parents had to get married. They'd always told us they got married in 1961, but it was

1962, three months before my sister was born. What's amusing is that my father was an accountant

who was insanely fast with math. Whenever he was asked how many years they'd been married, he'd be off by one.

My mother would correct him through clenched teeth, and then my father would nod and agree.

When my paternal grandfather died, the federal government reached out to do a state funeral.

He had been career army and a colonel, so he didn't question it. Then the funeral came and they

went all out.

Huge procession, people showing up who were really big names, like heads of departments,

senators, retired senators, people from the CIA and State Department. It was nuts, and we were

all super confused. Turns out he was a key dude in the OSI during World War II. And when the OSI splintered into the CIA and Secret Service, he went the Secret Service route.

He wasn't on White House detail, but instead worked in a covert office that dealt with counterfeiting and currency.

He went blind when I was a toddler and retired from the Army.

For whatever reason, he told no one about all his

covert work with the OSI and Secret Service, and the only person who knew, my grandmother,

was sworn to secrecy and never told anyone. My father grew up thinking he was just a colonel working

on base. Only after his death were we given all sorts of cool crap like publications by him,

lectures given by him, and all kinds of things from various things he did and was known for.

All I knew him as was a blind old man who was perpetually smoking, drinking, and being a crotchety geyser.

Turns out he was a bad mother effer, and all but none of us knew.

My great-grandmother wasn't actually Mexican, but was rather

adopted by a Mexican family from a Chinese family who was being kicked out of Mexico when

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