Not many things surprise me today. At 75, I take most things in stride.
But, at the request of my daughter, I am scanning all my genealogical papers so that she won't have to deal with them. I came across and read a medical report that my mother had answered for her doctor. It was within five years of her death and many items in it surprised me because she had never talked about them. I learned that I had had three siblings lost through miscarriages, that she had horrible nightmare that kept her awake or woke her up, and that her migraine headaches were much worse than I realized. My mother and I talked often and over intensely private things, so I was surprise these were never brought up.
I also found that when she wanted to find out what my job as a programmer entailed, she didn't just take a short course in how to keypunch, she attended the Automation Institute of America and took a course from 5 July to 6 Sept, 1968, full time. She received no grades, but I was quite impressed by the effort and the nice notes she received from her instructors. It was so much effort to be able to talk to me about computers before personal computers were a part of everyday life.
Very few things in my genealogy have surprised me. I knew where my family came from on both sides and that misspellings were common. I knew most of them were farmers and the rest tended to be pastors. I found a few divorces, a few ran out on their wives, and a few participated in wars. It seemed that every other generation they would move from one state to another. In general, they weren't among the historically interesting people.