The trouble is children only remember snatches of adult conversations...so the really interesting snippets about 'who was no better than she could have been' and 'all fur coat and knickers of course' tend to float over their heads then once they are grown, they need a sharp poke in the ribs to recall those elderly Aunties smelling slightly of cat pee and mothballs...
My first husband had a vast extended family...all of whom seemed to be in their dotage. Whenever there was a family funeral I'd be given a couple of doddery old ladies to look after...then Mum would take me to one side during the Wake and whisper about the secrets they held...Oooo...she didn't...she did you know...wouldn't think it now to look at her of course. And I'd look over at this decrepit person swathed in a fox tail collar clutching a huge black handbag and simply couldn't visualise her doing the things Mum told me about...
Mind you, I was young then and couldn't for one brief second imagine I'd ever reach the stage of being slightly doddery...though I don't smell of cat pee or mothballs.
But secrets don't remain so once you begin poking about in a family tree...there are they are for all to see that little Albert was actually adopted and Mary didn't wed until her baby was walking...could be your Granny wasn't your Granny after all...and that relative you vaguely remember who always sat on the stairs in floods of tears at family gatherings? She had to be 'put away' in the end...
I suppose like most people of my generation family secrets remained secret...adults would suddenly change the subject when you entered a room...Father had a Cousin who was always known as Poor Louie...whenever my parents were talking about her...and my brother and I were adept at listening at doors...the conversation would stop the moment we went into the room...Mother would announce it was breast of lamb for dinner and had we washed our hands.
But ferreting about in the family tree and finding Poor Louie, it transpires she was put into a home for the bewildered while still a child.
Sometimes there are trees which go way back to almost a thousand years...the further back you go the easier it is to find out the small details...land owned and Wills made in favour of an eldest daughter...stories carefully written down in Parish records...young men who attended Oxford or Cambridge and emerged with degrees in Law at the age of fourteen...girls married at thirteen with a dozen children before they reach their mid twenties...but how many secrets do those records hold of marriages made in some sort of hell and children farmed out to wet nurses...or sent to live with an Uncle on the other side of the country and never heard of again.
What secrets and lies there must be when you reach the Middle Ages with their endless squabbling over religion and their penchant for chopping off the heads of those found wanting...