This post deals with old events, almost as old as I am, but I hadn’t known some key facts about them until a couple of weeks ago. They’d been kept secret from me. I was deceived without actually being lied to. I still don’t know all the parts of the history, and maybe I never will.

Several years ago, I went searching for information about my father. He died in 1954 in a traffic accident, or so I was told. I was less than three years old at the time, but that’s not the only reason I have no memory of him. My surname is rare, making an Internet search easier. It wasn’t too hard to find confirmation of his date of death. The surprise was that he died in Shasta, California. I grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, and my mother always lived there. He might have been there on a business trip, I thought. His family was from the west coast, so maybe he was visiting a relative.

A few weeks ago, I idly looked at the records again and noticed something which I’d somehow overlooked. A memorial site gave his wife’s name — and it wasn’t my mother’s name!

This made me wonder what else I should know. My mother had given the impression that they were married when he died. She never mentioned his dying far from our home. She said very little, as if my having a father were a matter of no consequence. Her indifference rubbed off onto me, so I never pressed her with questions as I should have. What had really happened?

It was easy to find my parents’ marriage certificate, which was mostly what I expected; they were married in 1950, ten months before I was born. The one surprise was that it showed my father’s marital status as “Div.” So he was married both before and after being married to my mother? Presumably my parents divorced, but I haven’t found out who initiated it or on what grounds.

From there I went looking for information on his other wife, who had a more common surname. I don’t want to put full names into this post, so I’ll call her Pat. My father married her in 1953. After he died, she married a man I’ll call Ted. A picture of their joint gravestone confirms the marriage, which lasted until his death. Then I found a memorial page to their son, also named Ted, who was born to them in 1947.

In 1947. Before my parents were married.

Was Pat married to Ted both before and after she married my father? It’s possible. The memorial page makes it sound as if the son was born to a legitimate marriage. It’s possible the page shaded the truth, but at least the two were on very close terms both before and after.

It adds up to the following: My mother married a divorced man. The two were divorced before my father died far from my family home. The marriage lasted no more than three years, and having a baby wasn’t enough to keep them together. I was never told any of this. I can’t say I was explicitly lied to; I don’t recall my mother ever saying she was a widow, though I can’t swear she never did. She certainly never said she was a divorcee.

All this made me wonder how true the little I was told was. Did he really die in a traffic accident? I got a copy of his death certificate from Shasta County, and it confirmed that, giving additional details. He was in a head-on collision in O’Brien, California at 11:50 PM and died the next day in a hospital in Redding of injuries to his head. (In 1954, it was rare for a car to have seat belts.) Redding and O’Brien are in Shasta County and near the town of Shasta; the other reference to Shasta must have been to the county, not the town. His residence was in San Francisco, which is about 200 miles away. Why was he on a highway in Shasta County that late? Who was at fault? I don’t know and can’t easily find out. The certificate confirms he was married to Pat, so everything of importance is consistent.

The mystery is partially resolved, but it’s left bigger mysteries. When were my parents divorced? Why? Did my father bring about his own death by bad driving, or was he the victim of a drunk on the road? What kind of man was he? What did my mother see in him? Did he leave her, or did she leave him? Above all: Why was I kept in ignorance? Why did she consider the man she married so unimportant? I was cut off from virtually all information about my father’s side of the family. There was one more piece of information that might answer these questions: their divorce.

I went to the Manchester city clerk’s office in the hope of getting a divorce record. They told me they didn’t have records that old, but the municipal courthouse would. It was just a block and a half away, so I walked over there. Unfortunately, records from the fifties aren’t in a database. They’d have to search paper or microfiche by hand, and for that they wanted at least a close date. The best I could tell them was that it was between 1950 and 1953.

This leaves me at a dead end. Probably there are research services that could fill in the gaps for a large amount of money, but I don’t know if I want to go that way.

My father is an enigma to me. My mother and everyone else on her side of the family didn’t want me to learn even the bits that I’ve found out. That leaves me thinking I never really knew either of my parents. Keeping secrets from people when they’re entitled to know does no one any good.