Personal Secrets

What would you consider a personal secret?  Things seem a whole lot different these days when compared to the past.   With social media and the internet, it seems there are probably fewer secrets than there were in "the old days".

My relatives immigrated here, changed their last names for reasons that didnt carry to future generations.  My great great grandmother traveled here from Sweden with four sons.  They lived with differing last names.  Did that mean they had different fathers? Or did they just choose those names when they arrived? I know some names changed because of language barriers or pronunciations.  So would the name(s) be part of their personal secrets?

We each live our lives, things happen to us that may not happen to someone else, even those close to us like siblings. Our reluctance to discuss those things could be considered personal secrets. 

Should we respect the rights of people to have personal secrets?  Should we have the expectation to keep our personal secrets to ourselves?  In the past, it seems moreso than it is now.  Maybe the internet has changed that concept, that we shouldn't be keeping secrets from each other.

I've long suspected that the reason my grandmother married at a young age to a man who was much older than her was because she was pregnant.  It was a quiet wedding at home, the whole family wasn't even there.  At the time, she had been a young maid at a hotel where I suspect he had been staying.  But those are my suppositions.  When I tried to get her to talk about things because I was interested in genealogy, she told me many times to "let sleeping dogs lie". 

Which made me think about my own personal secrets.  Are they that important? Would someone be frustrated in the future not knowing something about me?  I usually consider myself an open person, but there are a few things I've kept to myself.  Because personal secrets are just that. Personal.