<P> Although Brennan seemed to have a relatively normal childhood, her parents disappeared when she was 15 years old . Her older brother Russ, himself still an adolescent, was unable to care for her and she was put in the foster care system . By the time she started college she had been to twelve different schools and has specifically said that she hated the lack of consistency . </P> <P> There has been contradictory evidence about her time in the system; in one episode, Brennan stated that her grandfather got her out of the foster system, but in a later episode, she indicates that she never knew her grandparents (possibly the two references are to two separate sets of grandparents, paternal and maternal). However, taking into consideration the fact that Brennan's parents had assumed new identities when she was 3 - years - old, the grandfather who had taken her in from her time in the foster system may not have been her biological grandfather . </P> <P> Her time in foster care was quite traumatic and abusive; Brennan indicated that she was once locked in the trunk of a car for two days because she broke a plate, and in the episode "The Finger in the Nest", she reveals to Booth that she walked into her elderly neighbor's house to find the woman dead . In the same episode, she also mentions to Booth that her parents were very concerned about her afterwards, because she started faking her own death . In Season 2, she mentions that during her time in the foster care system, she kept a list of foster homes she had been kicked out of on the bottom of her shoe . </P> <P> In the first season she hands Booth the file on her parents' disappearance and he agrees to look into it as a personal favor . It is later revealed in Season 2 that her parents, who were bank robbers specializing in safety deposit boxes, changed the family's identity after they stole some damaging FBI documents regarding the murder of an FBI agent and the false imprisonment of civil rights activist Marvin Beckett . Brennan's birth name was Joy Keenan . Her mother (real name Ruth Keenan, known under the assumed identity of Christine Brennan) had hoped to someday return to her children and family, but made a tape for Brennan to watch on her 16th birthday in case that never happened . Brennan later discovered that Ruth / Christine was murdered in 1993, two years after she and her husband went on the run . </P>

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