Family History Myth-tory #1: The Lies Your Grandma Tells You

Once a month I will post a Family History Myth-tory. A post that will feature a commonly held myth about family history which I will lampoon.

She may look sweet and innocent, she may bake the best cookies, she might shuffle around and seem harmless, but your grandmother is a liar. A stone cold fibber. She lies through her false teeth. So why this unprovoked attack on your granny? Because, in part at least, it is true. There are some things that grandma (or your family's FH guru) has told you that might be less than correct.

The Lies Your Grandma Told You:

1. All of the research has been done.

 Granny will tell you this for a number of reasons, mostly because she believes it's true. What she should really say is that when SHE last researched that particular line, there was no additional information to find. When it comes to family history, retracing someone else's work can be fun and enlightening. You will find all the things they missed, the things they got wrong, and it will help you from making the same mistakes so You can be confident lying to your grandchildren.

2. We are descendants of Charlemagne, Pope Pius XI, William Wallace, and Louis the XIV.

Ever notice how your grandma tells you about all the famous people you are related too? Chances are, you are not actually related to them. The further back in time you get, the sparser records become, so when your grandma, or great-grandma, or whatever well meaning family member stumbled across an older record that had the vaguest link to your actually family, they pounced on it like a hobo on a ham sandwich. Since you (and me) are probably related to a host of unrecorded and historically less important peasants, we may never know our exact origins until we meet them after we die. As an alternative try finding cool stories about relatives that lived a little more recently. Ancestors who lived in the dark days of the depression can be just as cool as the kings of ancient Europe.

3. All of your ancestors were wonderful people who paid their taxes and never talked at the movies.

While most of your ancestors were probably noble people, don't forget that they were people, and therefore imperfect. There is no need the turn them into a mythic being who couldn't be slain by the rebel horde during the Civil War. While I am definitely not a proponent of the 'warts-and-all' history (where you go hunting for something bad in order to tear down a historical figure), I don't believe we need to gloss over mistakes as if they didn't happen, because we can learn from mistakes and every cloud has a silver lining. For example, I had one ancestor who cheated on his wife when he was in his late 60s and fathered a child out of wedlock. Now we aren't getting that printed on t-shirts, we are not having monuments built, but that is part of our story for better or for worse, and what a wonderful story of forgiveness that his wife stayed with him for another 4 years until his death.

Well there you have it. Three lies your grandma told you. They may not have been famous, they might have been scalawags, but they are YOUR unknown scalawags and there is still plenty of research to do on them, so go out there and find them. And once you do, don't forget to tell your grandchildren about them.