I find it a bit amusing you're being downvoted, because while it's certainly possible that's not what said relative cared about, I've seen firsthand how much relatives care deeply about stories of dubious morality several generations back.
My dad was very interested in genealogy, and one of the things that frustrated him for years was a particular dead end:
An at the time young, unmarried woman a few generations back in our family tree had a child, and then moved in with her sister and her sisters husband.
The father was named as so-and-so, "currently employed as a travelling hat maker, resident in Bremen".
A "travelling hat-maker from Bremen" was not particular common in Norway at the time. He should have existed in the police register in Oslo for that time period (people had to register on arrival back then), and he's not. My dad found no trace of him in any other relevant registers from that time period either to my knowledge.
All clues point to the girl inventing this hat-maker to hide that she either didn't know the father or that the father was someone it shouldn't be, or possibly that the father of her child gave her a made up story. At the time not giving the name of the father would have been a crime, hence it was not that strange to see likely false accounts.
But here's the thing: That branch of the family had taken to the idea of a German ancestor that gave them justification for an upper-class sounding double-barreled last name, and even though that decision had been made a couple of generations before my dad started talking about this, that branch of the family reacted with intense anger at any idea that the woman in question had not been truthful, and were furious that he would not let it go. It was already scandalous enough that she was unmarried. That the name of the dad might be fake was too much.
This came up in the 90's. People got angry over something that happened about 150 years back in time, several generations before even the oldest family members involved were born.
Which goes to show that sensibilities around morality has an astounding power over people.
(I still occasionally for fun do searches for the various possible spellings of this supposed hat-makers name, and have not found a single German family using it)
> People got angry over something that happened about 150 years back in time, several generations before even the oldest family members involved were born.
This can vary. My grand-grand-grand-father (Romanian) married a Transylvania Saxon girl who had traveled across the Carpathians in order to run away from her brothers (I think this was around 1880-1890). She was the village's only homeless person, so to speak, had her head shaved (possibly because of lice), nobody was looking at her, apart from my grand-grand-grand-father who chose to marry her. Even though it doesn't paint that great of a picture when it comes to our family's ascendency (as my grand-grand-grand-mother was no aristocrat or anything, quite the contrary) the story got told for every generation since then.
My dad was very interested in genealogy, and one of the things that frustrated him for years was a particular dead end:
An at the time young, unmarried woman a few generations back in our family tree had a child, and then moved in with her sister and her sisters husband.
The father was named as so-and-so, "currently employed as a travelling hat maker, resident in Bremen".
A "travelling hat-maker from Bremen" was not particular common in Norway at the time. He should have existed in the police register in Oslo for that time period (people had to register on arrival back then), and he's not. My dad found no trace of him in any other relevant registers from that time period either to my knowledge.
All clues point to the girl inventing this hat-maker to hide that she either didn't know the father or that the father was someone it shouldn't be, or possibly that the father of her child gave her a made up story. At the time not giving the name of the father would have been a crime, hence it was not that strange to see likely false accounts.
But here's the thing: That branch of the family had taken to the idea of a German ancestor that gave them justification for an upper-class sounding double-barreled last name, and even though that decision had been made a couple of generations before my dad started talking about this, that branch of the family reacted with intense anger at any idea that the woman in question had not been truthful, and were furious that he would not let it go. It was already scandalous enough that she was unmarried. That the name of the dad might be fake was too much.
This came up in the 90's. People got angry over something that happened about 150 years back in time, several generations before even the oldest family members involved were born.
Which goes to show that sensibilities around morality has an astounding power over people.
(I still occasionally for fun do searches for the various possible spellings of this supposed hat-makers name, and have not found a single German family using it)