Family Myths

[toni*]

my mothers line of Punnetts originally came from Punnetts Town which was named after them.

[poppysmum]

Buckaroo -  that is an exiciting story!
caroline

[Jillie42]

My mother-in-law's maiden name was Mantell and the family always believed that they were related to Gideon Mantell

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/geology/chamber/mantell.html

needless to say I've never found the connection. Our Mantell's came from Norfolk. THAT bubble was promply burst.

My mum's family was called Sutcliffe and although the last 4 generations were born and bred in SE London there was always a myth that the family owned cotton mills in Yorkshire...........and I've found out that yes, we came from Todmordon, Calderdale, West Riding of Yorkshire......... but we certainly never owned any mills - simply worked in them with both Daniel and his son John (gt gt granfather and gt grandfather) being engineers.

Funny how the myth tends to me more grandiose then the reality

[Bill749]

I have come up against so many family myths - some with a grain of truth, others pure fiction - that I have written a 1-hour illustrated talk on the subject!

Bill

[mike175]

One of our myths is that we were descended from a titled family called Wheate who lived at Glympton Park, Oxfordshire, and the inheritance was lost or stolen many generations back. The myth dates back at least 200 years as there is a copy of a letter written to an ancestor by one of the titled family in 1805.

My exhaustive online research based on other family records has found a possible connection, but the potential common ancestor died in 1581 

Mike.

[Rosa Xanthina]

My grandfather and grandmother emigrated to USA and settled in Pensacola but came back to Liverpool after only a few years - apparently my grandmother couldn't take the hurricanes.   My mother told me that her father and a friend built a church in Pensacola which burned down and they then built another one.   I've never been able to verify the story.
Rosa

[little meg]

Gosh, I have so many myths in various lines.

One that I laugh at is that the one line of family believed that one of their ancestors, Riverina Simpson, was the first female born in the Riverina, (New South Wales, Australia), obviously thought this because of the name given to her, yet they never checked and noticed that she had two sisters born there before her. 

Another was that a Brower Wild (gr grandfathers brother) owned hotels in London.
Close, but no cigar.  It was a John Brear Wild and yes, he owned hotels in London.

On my husband side there are the Thomsons, the family all new that they were from Germany and had presumed, and many swear to it, that he must have been a german sailor and jumped ship and changed his name.  This was decided as they did not see Thomson as a German name.  I found the name Thomson in Germany 

also on my hubby's side they have the name Burn, " we are related to Robbie Burns the poet" they all say.
Not so!!!

I never disregard the myths, but never take them as gospel either.

Margaret

[lesleyhannah]

These family myths!  When I first started my tree (and had come to a standstill in the research, the way you do) I offered to trace my aunt's family (an inlaw, not a blood relative). My aunt, well in her 80s, is olive skinned with black-brown eyes, and still with dark brown hair. Stunning as a young woman.

She was always very proud of the fact that her grandfather married a Spaniard, hence the family's dark complexion. So we were all excited when I started the search. But the grandfathers both married Nottingham girls!

So we thought it must be great-grandfathers. But they married Midlands girls too.

My aunt was really upset by these findings - I'd destroyed an image she'd had of herself for 80 years.

I believe John Hurt felt the same on WDYTYA when he found his family story about being Irish was just a myth.

Is it better not to know?

[mike175]

I think I'd be very careful about disillusioning anyone over a long-held family myth . . . especially the older members of the family. Unless of course they genuinely want to know. I suspect some of the older relatives probably wouldn't believe it anyway . . . after all, you can't trust these new-fangled computers, can you . . . 

Mike.