Is AUTHOR wrong in the post ? POST : I'm extremely into genealogy. I've put a lot of time and effort into researching my own over the past 6 years. I send out periodic updates to family members all over the country via emails maybe twice a year but definitely once at the end of the year. I almost never hear back from them on this particular issue. Basically, no one is as big a nerd about this stuff as me. I do know that they read the emails and internalize the info. I've gotten pretty far back generationally speaking and most of my family are late-19th century to early 20th-century immigrants from Europe that settled in and around New York and Connecticut. I'm incredibly proud of that immigrant part of my lineage considering the station in which we find ourselves only a few decades later.

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But in August, I got thrown a bit of a curveball. It turns out that me and my cousin's 5th &amp; 6th, great-grandfathers were slave owners in upstate New York from the 1770's until the 1820's when the last 19 were freed. I found a list of that last group and three of those people had the same last name as my cousin and after a bit of digging, well... to make a long story short: part of my cousin's family (his mother's side, white) was once owned by another part of his family (his father's side, black). I find this mortifying and it is absolutely killing me. It is literally is making my stomach hurt right now. I desperately even payed a professional genealogist a few hundred bucks to try and disprove my finding somehow to no avail. I've been putting off an update for months and now it's the end of the year and I'm faced with the choice of telling everyone or telling no one. I've written the draft email that excludes this information but I haven't sent it yet. I feel very strongly that adding this information into the email would cause undue humiliation and mental anguish for my family and particularly my cousin and my aunt and I don't want to visit upon them anything close to the emotions I'm having, if not more. No one would have ever learned about this if it wasn't for my dumb hobby anyway. 

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So, AITA if I leave this out?