I am so sorry for the shock an pain that you're going through. Your mother, whatever her reasons, might have handled this better. Then again, maybe she handled it the best way she could.

I have a cousin that is 8 years older than I am. When he was filling out papers for college he too discovered that his mother's maiden name was on his birth certificate. Knowing his father, the man that raised him, he knew that something was wrong. There's no way my uncle would have been that irresponsible, let his mother give birth unmarried in the 50's.

So he decided to come up and talk to my father since my father discovered at 15, after the death of his mother, that the man that had been listed on his birth certificate was not actually his father. In my own father's case, my grandmother did not have a choice, she was legally married to her Mr. Brown even though they had been seperated for 3 years and living on two different sides of the country when my father was born.

So anyway, my cousin comes up, terribly upset looking for answers. Which my father provided for him, with the exception of the man's name. He said my cousin would have to ask his mother that question himself. It turns out that my cousin's biological father was not honest with my Aunt, and there was a whole drama surrounding this. Before my cousin left that night my father told him "your father is the man that raised you. X has loved you and treated you exactly the same as your brother since you were a baby." My cousin was mature enough to realize that his mother gave him a gift of a loving father. To this day his mother does not know that he knows about the circumstances of his birth.

So here's the thing, if you have to know ask her siblings, relatives, or her friends from that time etc. But what if you're wrong, what if she did the right thing by burying something in the past? What if it turns out that she was raped or whatever? But before you open up Pandora's box, be prepared to deal with the consequences. And in my opinion, you don't have a right to know. She should not have to relive something she so obviously wants to forget just to satisfy your curiosity.

And there is a possibility, however remote, that she's telling the truth. My daughter was listed at birth as an African-American male in her military medical records. We're so white we glow in the dark, and she is obviously not now, nor ever been a male. It was quite a bit of red-tape to clear that up as she was born over-seas.