Shakespeare's Sister

 From Phys.org:

By analyzing digital copies of an incredibly rare and obscure 17th-century Italian religious text, a University of Bristol academic has revealed that a long-lost document previously thought to have been written by William Shakespeare's father belongs, in fact, to his relatively unknown sister Joan. The document, a religious tract in which the writer pledges to die a good Catholic death, written at a point in English history when Catholicism was strongly disapproved of, was found by a bricklayer hidden in the rafters of the Shakespeare House in Stratford-upon-Avon around 1770.

It was seen and described by two early Shakespeare experts and then lost. Both thought it must have belonged to Shakespeare's father, John, who died in 1601, which would imply that he was a zealous secret Catholic in an Elizabethan world of priest holes where people risked torture for their faith. Subsequent scholars thought it was a forgery designed to give the impression of being a document from John's lifetime.

In fact, the document is actually a translation of an Italian text, "The Last Will and Testament of the Soul," and Professor Matthew Steggle, from the University's Department of English, used Google Books and other internet archives to track down early editions of that text in Italian and six other languages, many of which editions survive only in a single copy and are scattered across the libraries of Europe. (Read more.)