Category: Fictitious and Legendary Genealogy

Categories: Genealogy Help | Family

This is a high level category. Please do not add individual profiles. Add profiles to the narrowest category possible. See How to Categorize.

Background

Fictitious and legendary genealogy takes many forms. Examples include

genealogies that have incorporated legendary heroes like King Arthur, whose biographies and genealogy are not provable from historical record but have been propagated in literary works and folklore, into the histories of more recent families
fabricated documents that "prove" a relationship that never was
fraudulent genealogies created by unscrupulous "professional genealogists" who took advantage of their clients' desire for aristocratic ancestry

Once published (or propagated on the Internet) genealogies incorporating legends or fictions can become embedded in a family's version of its history. It can be difficult to eradicate the belief that one's family is descended from King Arthur or an Indian princess, and if fake documents were created to support a particular story, it can even be difficult to tell fact from fiction.

In this category, the word fiction is used to include fictitious genealogies created or propagated by someone who can be presumed to have known that some or all of their "information" was fiction. Legends and legendary is a broader term that includes some ancient history passed orally from person to person which sometimes contains miraculous elements and generally is hard to verify from other records, and also includes more modern family stories embedded in genealogies which have grown up without necessarily intending to deceive, but which turn out to contradict documented facts.

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