LDS Genealogy

Stories have been handed down through my family because I come from a long line of storytellers. This is wonderful for collecting the colorful side of ancestrial life, but it’s also a challenge. Are the stories true, sort of true, or mere legend?

Collect all the legends you encounter as you interview relatives, search your memory, or scour the internet. Write them all down and record them in the histories of the people you are researching. Whether they are true or not, you want them preseved, because the mere fact that they have been told through your family makes them important. They tell people what members of your family consider memorable. The stories can preserve a family’s sense of humor, its values, and its style of drama.

Try to record them essentially the way you heard them. You can also record your own version, if you have a skill for storytelling. Give credit to the storyteller who told you the first version you recorded, because it tells you much about that person.

If you’re not sure the story is true, do some research into the time, place, and events to determine if it could be true. If it involved a famous person, is it likely the paths ever crossed? If it requires a person to be present for a famous event, could the person have been there? Is he even the right age? (There is one story in my history of someone fighting in the Revolutionary War, but he was denied a pension and most researchers don’t think he was even old enough to have fought.)

I have a family story involving a relative who is said to have known the Wright Brothers. I can’t put her and them in the same place, but I can’t absolutely prove she never was either. When I was listening to her tell the story of the famous people she knew, I was too interested in the stories to question more carefully. Couple with the other famous person she knew (a famous villian), however, reveals some interesting things about her, so whether it’s true or not, her commentary on those people tell me a great deal about her and they’re fun stories, so I keep them around and handed them down to my own children. Whether or not they are true no longer worries me; they are firmly lodged into our family lore and they are there to stay. When I tell them, I simply start out, “It’s told in our family…,” a commentary which hints that it might just be a legend.

Just as the folklore of Paul Bunyon and other legends shape our national personality, the stories and legends handed down through your family will shape your family’s collective personality. Don’t lose them.