My paternal grandfather died in 1971. He never spoke about his childhood, but it was apparent that his father was not a part of it, nor was his mother at some point in his early youth. I do not know if his three sons pressed him for information, or what those conversations might have sounded like. Wish I had asked. SO many questions I wish I had asked of now-deceased ancestors - it's painful to think about.
Anyhow, what was known was that he ended up living with his grandmother in Pomerania (in what is now extreme NE Poland) and taking an apprenticeship as a 'Tischler' - a 'joiner--cabinet maker, woodworker. He immigrated to the US in 1910. The family had kept contact with the children of the employer for whom he worked as an apprentice (though they knew nothing of grandpa's early years), and we had two photos, one of his grandmother, who my father and two uncles called Wilhelmina Goetsch, and one lone photo of his mother, who was identified as Anna Goetsch.
So who was his father? Here was an obvious brick wall regarding my surname--a favorite subject for many genealogists.
I started getting interested in genealogy at the time of the birth of my first child in the late 1980's. So, my discovery comes in the pre-internet era. These days I would have just gone to Ancestry or Family Search and discovered these things much more easily on-line. But back then it involved many hours in my local LDS family history library poring through microfilms in a darkened room.
We knew the name of the town where grandpa took his apprenticeship, but not definitively where it was. The town was called Greifenberg, and there are three of those in Germany. I found the right one by process of elimination and some good luck. The correct Greifenberg had church book records from the 19th century, and once I had the correct microfilm in hand, the discoveries came thick and fast.
First of all, grandpa's mother was Anna Maria Wilhelmina Wetzel - a Wetzel by maiden name. Her mother, the grandmother that grandpa lived with as a youth and young adult, was Willhelmina Wetzel, nee Goetsch, who married Julius Wetzel. That name was new to me and to all of our family. Julius was a journeyjman brick-layer/stone mason as was his father Georg Samuel Wetzel. That's as far back as the church book records went. Georg was born about 1801.
So, my Wetzel surname is inherited through my great grandmother, and my grandpa's silence about his youth was because of the serious stigma that came with being illegitimate at the time. My father and uncles were a bit reluctant to accept this news, but I showed them the print-outs of microfilm images of all the relevant records, and everyone came to accept the situation. I'm so glad to have made these discoveries and been able to share them before my two uncles Wetzel passed away in 1994 and 1996.