Married Under a False Name
I was not at the wedding, it was way before I was born, but I did get to see the fallout from the event. When my aunt was married, my great-grandmother stood up at the point in the ceremony where they ask for reasons that the bride and groom should not be married and declared that,
“She is not a Smith, she is getting married under a false name!” Apparently, nobody had a clue what she was talking about and everybody assumed that she had started to suffer from dementia and so as she began to rant about my aunt’s name not being “Smith,”
Some of the members of the family removed her from the church and the ceremony continued. It was decades before we learned the shocking truth behind those words. Fast forward fifty or more years and my grandmother, my aunt’s mother, is dying.
A few weeks before she passed on, she told my aunt that her father, my grandfather, was not her biological father and that she had married him after she had given birth to her.
My grandfather obviously knew the truth and so did my great-grandparents, but I presume everybody else just assumed that he was the father all along. My grandmother refused, however, to tell her who her father was. When we dug a little into the family tree, we uncovered my aunt’s birth certificate.
Sure enough, she was registered under my grandmother’s maiden name and not my grandfather’s name. Story credit: Reddit / simev