Family legends- would you go back to verify or debunk them?

Question

My Dad dies last December (Covid), and I've come to find out that a lot of the tales he told as 'family history' simply aren't true. Now I'm questioning so much history! My oldest daughter named her son after a supposedly heroic ancestor, and now we find out the incident didn't happen! I really would like to go back (in the Tardis of course, and not interfere) to find out if any shreds of truth are in these tales!

Answer 1

My Dad used to tell such wonderful stories, and I'd hang on every word and believed it was "exactly" that way. Once I realized he embellished things a little, it became important to emulate my father and carry on the tradition, and so that fish that was caught when he said it was a foot long became two feet long when I told it. Little did I know there really wasn't ever a fish, and that the first person to tell the story with a fish only said it was a few inches in size.

But I'm sure that's how these things go. We retell them over and over, stretching the truth each time, until someone says "stop". So my recommendation is that you try to tell both sides if you like, and that helps others understand what's going on. Especially if it's an embedded family story that's been passed around. So if they went that day and didn't catch anything, but Dad liked to tell the story that they caught a "whopper", then you can relate both ways and even smile at the recollection, knowing Dad was just being "Dad" at the time.

Comments

Scott:

      One of the perils of age is that you start telling the stories that you heard from your father and grandfather.  They get better with each telling.

                                         Roger

Answer 2

My grandmother always told us her grandfather fled for his life from the French revolution.  When I started doing our tree I discovered that, although he was French, he was born at least 20 years after the revolution ended.  So much for that dramatic story!   Dissapointing but, still, I prefer to know what's actually true.

Comments

I think it's interesting how often family stories, even if not absolutely, true have grains of truth in them.  For example, in your case, the family preserved an oral record of its French origin, just with some gloss over time.

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Possible that even 20 years after the Revolution there might still have been unrest fomented in that period. Early 1800s were the Napoleonic wars, so while it might not have been fleeing from the Revolution itself, it could have been from wars which found their origins in ideas from the Revolution.

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Is it possible that your grandmother's grandfather had an ancestor in the Napoleonic era who had the same name? I find that when you get back that far, there is often a fair amount of name recycling, and consequent confusion.

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There were several mini- revolutions, 1830, 1848, and the big Paris Commune in 1871.

Answer 3

I think my favorite family legend is one about one of my ancestors, about whom a family history book published I think sometime in the 1940s claimed that he was one of eight sons of this family all born during the reign of Queen Anne and all who fought in the wars of Queen Anne. Were that true, it would be a remarkable family indeed, because Queen Anne only reigned for 15 years.

Comments

I found out through research- and this is true- that one of my ancestors on my mother's side was hanged for participating in Bacon's Rebellion, in Virginia in 1676. Captain Thomas Williford or Wilsford, IV. Interestingly enough, another ancestor, Colonel Thomas Ballard Jr, was one of the prosecutors in that case, and went on to become the Speaker of the House of Burgesses in Virginia, from 1689-82. He apparently had been directly involved with Bacon, who called him a variety of colorful epithets.

Once I get back into the 17th c, far too many of the lines are interlaced, making things interesting to tease out. But no nearly as bad as Dad's side, who were Mennonites, and tended to marry within a fairly closed circle. I am my own 4th and 5th cousin! Dad was the first in his family to marry an 'Inglisch', as Grandma put it. (And Mom was in fact, mostly English...)

Answer 4

One of my great, grandfather's first cousin, Phil Stong, wrote a book called Buckskin Breeches based on a diary that his other grandfather.  

I have an article announcing the book that repeats his story about our common ancestor, Joseph Stong - https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Stong-35.  It recites that he objected to the Napoleonic Revolution and left Germany with nothing but a Greek grammar, the clothes on his back and $40,000 (more money that he said that any Stong had since).  "The Westward Course of Our Empire," The Boston Evening Transcript (Boston, Massachusetts), April 10, 1937.

Joseph was born in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and he was the grandson of the  original immigrant, who immigrated in 1754, about 19 years before Napoleon was even born.

I have always wondered if it was a real tradition (because I think that Phil knew better) or just a marketing ploy. 

Comments

In my case, among other tales, Dad told a thrilling tale of how his mother, grandmother, and aunts, were bundled into the false bottom of a hay wagon, and driven out of Stalin's Russia by her father and brother. As Dad told it, her father was shot at the border after the guards asked his name- which was Abram (Friesen)- because it was 'a Bible name'. Her brother, also named Abram, replied 'Viktor!' when they asked him- a half-truth, because that is what he was called in their village, to differentiate him from his father. So they let him through, with his father's body, after thrusting their bayonets through the hay, of course. I'd always imagined how harrowing it must have been for my grandmother, hearing the shots, and the bayonets, and wondering if 'Viktor' would be shot too...

Well, talking with my aunts... very little of it was true. In fact, instead of getting out in the 20s, during Stalin's purges, they left the Ukraine in 1918, while the civil war was still going on. (My grandmother told a couple of very interesting tales of when the 'Whites' and the 'Reds' fought their way through her village- from the horse's mouth, so to speak, and she wasn't one for lying, unlike Dad.) They didn't ride in the false bottom of the wagon, as far as my aunts knew, and their father wasn't shot at the border- he died in Manitoba, after they arrived. 'Viktor' did in fact go back though, to attempt to get other family members out, and never made it back out. He died in a gulag in Siberia, jailed because he was a pastor. (One of his grandchildren managed to get photos to our family in North America- the family preceded the truck with his body to the graveyard, with a large wooden cross, carried by one of the other grandsons. Guess who also went to the gulag?)

My grandson's middle name is Viktor, after my great-uncle. This was before we found out about Dad's interesting view of the truth. My daughter says she's not changing his name, because the spirit of the story is still a good one, even if it's fiction. Very much like in 'Who Shot Liberty Valance?'- your print the fiction. And Samuel Viktor is a terrific name. :-)

I don't know if it is a case of Dad believing his own lies, having told them often enough, or if he was embroidering the truth to make things more interesting for us kids, or if it had something to do with a TBI he had after a motorcycle accident in 1960 that nearly killed him. (He was wearing a helmet- it was just that he landed head-first on the pavement.) Of course, he had to embroider than too, extending his stay in the hospital from a week to four months...