I found my (presumed) great-grandfather's initials in a news article where my great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother are mentioned by name.
There is been a mystery in the family for a long time; my grandfather's last name was the same as his mother's but his older brother and sister had a different last name, even though they were supposedly his full brother and sister. We had always been told that my grandfather was raised in an orphanage, but that didn't make a whole lot of sense because there wasn't any information about the death of his parents. To top it all off, my grandparents' marriage registry lists the names of both of my grandmother's parents but only the name of my grandfather's mother; his father was listed as "Name Unknown." This may be the thing that drove me most to start doing genealogy on my family--the great mystery of "Who was our grandfather's father?"
After finding the initials "H.D.O." in the news article about a domestic disturbance between this man, who was living with my great-grandmother and her mother dated a year or so before my grandfather was born, and an upstairs neighbor was enough to lead me to find the real name of "H.D.O." and further evidence that he is the biological father of my grandfather and my grandfather's older sister. This additional evidence has also led to information about the "orphanage" where my grandfather was raised and some good reasons why the older family members may have wanted to be so quiet about the whole situation. In addition to providing the initials, the articles describe the events in enough detail to give a bit of a glimpse about how the players of this little story lived; the upstairs neighbor lady who needed help peeling potatoes, the single mother who lived downstairs in a single room with her mother, two children, and a boyfriend, the 16 cents of liquor shared between the single mother and the upstairs neighbors after the potatoes had been peeled, and the (jealous?) rage of the boyfriend after he came home and found his girlfriend upstairs with the neighbors.
It's good to know that we don't inherit 100% of our ancestors' traits.