How do you handle "complicated" family stories in public forums?

Question

I've been working on my personal tree and there is a complicated divorce with rather unsavory details published in a divorce request around the 1900 mark.

I am wanting to write accurate bio's but am cognizant that there are other still-living descendants around (including myself).

Do I write the story with the details? Do I just save the divorce record in a footnote for curious people to find themselves later?

Comments

If you found the information on line it is already public knowledge and people know it already.

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There is a copy of the entire divorce "disclosure" which goes into great detail about "dirty laundry". I'm going to take the below commenter's advice and just avoid the gory details.

Answer 1

Does the story have an important genealogical purpose?  Even if the information is publicly available that doesn't mean you have to go into gory detail.  What you said here may be fine "Mary and John went through a difficult divorce at a time when divorce was unusual."  And if there was a follow-on that's important for people to know "Mary married John's brother two months later,"  or   "As a result, Mary left her family and moved across the country to East Overshoe..." or whatever, that should be enough.  It sounds like people can find the full story if they want to.

Answer 2

Kathie is absolutely right.  Just because something is publicly available and could be found doesn't mean that is other people's business, particularly if it is relatively recent and potentially causes embarrassment or pain.  On those types of things, I would just state the bare facts without comment.

Answer 3

I agree with Kathie. I used to include the cause of death in the bios until one day I discovered an ancestor who sadly took his own life. It just felt wrong to make that public. If someone wanted to view the death record the information was there. And it helped me realize that, just like movies that include way too much disturbing visual information, my story did not have to be that way.

Comments

The death certificate for one of my ancestors says he was killed when struck by a freight train. How it happened became a controversy among various contingents of family members (and still is). One of his sons always maintained it was suicide; the man suffered from clinical depression and migraines (with few to no treatment options in that era) and was heard to say he had had enough of "these infernal headaches" and was going to do something about them. His wife and others, however, had a couple of different narratives. One was that he had some kind of seizure just as he went to walk across the tracks. The other was that he was hard of hearing and didn't hear the train whistle. My opinion? Well, I wasn't there (it happened LONG before I was born) but the man lived next to those tracks his entire life and would have known the train schedules, so I'm a bit skeptical that he would have gone anywhere near the tracks when a train was due. As for the rest of the story (passed down from the son), his wife was livid. Not so much because she lost her husband, but because of the shame it would bring to the family if it were indeed suicide. A plausible explanation for how the alternate narratives came about. The only death-related item linked on his profile is the death certificate, which again only mentions being hit by a freight train.

I had a first cousin 4 times removed who might have murdered his wife and gotten away with it. He was convicted of murder, but after 9 years in prison he was pardoned. There was enough doubt about her manner of death that no one truly knew whether he had killed her or she had committed suicide in a manner that implicated her husband. That one happened in 1842, so everyone who knew them is long gone. I did post a link to a blog in which the suicide versus murder story was told on both their profiles. The blog post left the question of murder versus suicide to the reader to answer. (Or not. I certainly had no answer!)

All this to say... when in doubt, err on the side of the more, shall we say, delicate explanation of events.... In fact, I was just working on another couple of profiles where a man was married to a woman and then married her younger sister. The first wife was still alive and well, so he had not been widowed, and the younger sister had been living with them as a teenager. All kinds of possible scenarios come to mind... but no information on what led to these events is available, so I simply stated the facts of the names and the dates of the marriages.

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Just a couple of thoughts - also agreeing with what Kathie said so well.

I don't think there's anything wrong with stating "died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, which was determined to have occurred due to severe depression/overwhelming grief/other medical reason" - as such could be of genealogical importance to someone down the line undergoing a similar situation.  

If it's just to be dramatic, or satisfy those who like to read morbid details, then I would not.  Let those folk go find it for themselves.

Divorce issues are different, and don't usually serve a genealogical purpose, so I would be careful when/if including them (even if reported fully in a newspaper).  

As genealogists, we record the factual data, but don't need to expand it beyond the fact, especially when it could be painful to living relatives.

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There are good reasons for not describing the cause or location of death in detail in such cases. Perhaps WikiTree should have guidelines on this, but even a discussion about that might be dangerous.

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I think the time-frame matters.  A person who took their own life due to depression/grief in the 1890s is not very likely to be of interest to anyone other than descendants looking for answers.

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If a cause of death is suicide, I generally state that and link to the death certificate or obituary, if available. If part of what we are doing with our family history is to understand a past life in its own context, without judgment, I can't imagine many more important facts than that someone chose to take their own life. It needn't be purient. It can just be their truth.

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Romeo and Juliet ended with a double suicide; if it's inappropriate to mention suicide at all, it's curious that audiences have watched a pair of teenagers take their own lives on stage for hundreds of years. One could argue "oh, they're fictional characters" but these historical figures are quite remote from any of us. Several generations and centuries removed, no one alive who ever knew them.

This topic, or similar ones ("My ancestor went to prison/my ancestor was born out of wedlock/my ancestor was a slave owner") just get rehashed endlessly on here, with the same arguments over and over. There's the people who want to pretend that nothing bad, happened, ever and everyone in history died at age 102 of natural causes after a fulfilling heterosexual marriage. Then there's the people like me who prefer telling the truth, and get called sensationalists for it.

Our ancestors didn't live their lives to make us comfortable. They lived their lives, for better or worse, for themselves, the same as we all do. 

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Then there's the people like me who prefer telling the truth, and get called sensationalists for it.

Our ancestors didn't live their lives to make us comfortable. They lived their lives, for better or worse, for themselves, the same as we all do. 

commented by Jessica Key G2G6 Pilo

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What's really "funny" (not the ha ha ha kind) is - when you read some of the newspaper reports from back in the 1800s, long before any of us were ever born, how sensationally such incidents were reported back then.  Down to the very last gory little detail.  Messy.  Bloody.  Body parts all over.

Yet here we are, sanitising those incidents because we might, maybe, offend or upset someone alive now who may, or may not, even be related to that long dead person.

When I read the somewhat graphic details of the death of an ancestor's sibling — what horrified me wasn't the reports of the deaths (he was not the only one who died), it was that - with older siblings alive and in the same place - it was my 16-year-old ancestor who not only identified his older brother's smashed-up body, he also testified to the inquest into the incident that caused the deaths.

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I think, if whatever we are recording took place before our living memory, and we have no survivors of the generation ahead of us, there should be no problem with factually recording such incidents.

If, however, the incident/s took place within our living memory, and there are others who are still living down the line (descendants, or otherwise), we can temper how we record the facts.  In such cases s simple statement or two should suffice, and anyone wishing to know more can go read it for themselves in the same way we found the information.

Incidents that took place before our living memory, and where there are survivors in the generation preceding ours, we should look at things case by case, and temper the need for factual recording with some empathy.

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Melanie, when my great-grandaunt died in 1902, the local newspaper printed her suicide letter in full. The circumstances were exceptional, granted, but good grief. The newspapers also felt it was pertinent to mention that she had a pretty face; I suppose no one would care if an ugly woman died!

I've talked about this on G2G before, but I really believe that part of the issue is that, for some people, the appeal of genealogy as a hobby is their perception of the past as a place in which the messy, complicated things of the modern world didn't exist. It's not that you or I are sensationalists, they are romanticizing the past. They don't like to be reminded that things like divorce, and suicide, and extramarital sex, all those things happened in the past, too. Maybe they can't even articulate why they don't want to acknowledge it, so they insist it's about not hurting the hypothetical feelings of hypothetical people. But then, people love to acknowledge their war veteran ancestors, but surely war is one of the most unpleasant and gory things imaginable. I mean, the entire purpose to go out and blow limbs off people you have never even met. 

Answer 4

My opinion is different most of the answers. I believe a person's life is honored by the truth. Told sensitively not sensationally, of course, but that does not mean censoring the facts. How often have we found in our research evidence of "life lived", but just shadows and all we can do is speculate and suppose? What a gift to have the voice of the subjects, an explaination for the pain that you may have seen ripples of in other related parties.

I found in researching one family in a collateral branch that a very young daughter was sexually abused by the hired hand (covered in graphic detail in the local paper in a manner unthinkable today). Both parents had mental and substance abuse issues - the father was away tending to the institutionalized mother when the daughter was assaulted. The mother later died in the state mental hospital. It is all their truth, their life.

With respect to the original question, I would make the information available, via a link if the source is online and public if you really don't want to state the facts in the bio, but if not available I would discuss in sufficient detail to provide context to what I am assuming was a painful episode that had repurcussions on the lives of others.

In any case, 120 years is a long time, even if there are still second or third generation descendants alive.

Answer 5

Since Ellen Curnes seems to be in the minority here, I'll chime in.  I'd also tend to provide more information rather than less, but for a bit of a different reason.

I don't think genealogical significance is the only criterion for providing information about a person.  (And neither do many WTers, based on information they add to profiles, and profiles they add for people who never had descendants, etc.)  

Historical significance can also be a consideration, including for causes of death and divorce.  For example, I had a great grandfather who was killed in a sawmill accident working in conditions that would never be tolerated today.

And some of these things are just interesting!  I wouldn't necessarily call it "morbid curiosity."  If genealogy was nothing more than recording names and dates, I wouldn't bother to do it (or at least not so much of it).

Of course, I wouldn't want to cause pain for close living relatives, but on the other hand, people who choose to take offense at the disclosure of information about distant relatives are in my opinion being over-sensitive.