52 Ancestors - Family Lore

Before I started researching my family, I accepted family lore as fact. If my maternal grandmother said our Scottish ancestors were members of Clan Campbell, then they were, if my paternal grandfather said his parents were Welsh, then they were and if my maternal grandfather's father said his proof of Mayflower ancestry was lost when he emigrated from New Jersey to Canada, then it was.

With fifteen years of genealogical research under my belt, of course, I am now a little more skeptical of these claims. I do believe that most family lore contains at least a kernel of truth, but any story passed down through generations of ancestors has the potential to become distorted like the results of an epic game of telephone.

I still don't know if my Scottish ancestors aligned themselves with the Campbells and I'm not even sure how you would go about researching that.  I do know now that neither of my grandfather's parents were born in or even very near to Wales and none of their parents appear to have been either. I'm pretty surprised that this turned out to be untrue since my grandfather was very much a straight arrow and he wrote in his story/autobiography that his parents spoke Welsh, but even his own father listed his and his siblings' birthplaces as in England. And the Mayflower claims? Well, I'm not sure what papers the youngest, still single child of the family, with older married siblings would have been entrusted with when emigrating to Canada that would have proven our connection to that ship. If anyone in the family had such proof, my money would have to be on his sister, who was accepted as a Daughter of the American Revolution; proving, to the standards of the day, that she was descended from a minute-man and a private in the militia during the Revolutionary War.

Since it is January 1st as I write this, I guess the next question is whether or not I will try to find evidence of any of these stories in 2024. I'm still not 100% sure which lines I will be researching this coming year. Certainly, I plan to pick up where I left off with finding Donald's Calma ancestors in Italian church records. And I did finally just send off Donald's and my DNA to Ancestry this afternoon. I'm pretty sure that I'll be concentrating on the paternal side of my tree. I've become newly intrigued by my paternal grandfather's maternal lines in England the past few months and also my grandmother's paternal ancestry in Sweden. Family lore or not, there is plenty of interesting material in those lines to keep me busy, and plenty to learn about doing research in those places as well.

As I mentioned in my last post, the next couple of months look chaotic; they include another surgery for Donald who is still in physical rehab and a house move for me, so while I do want to see if I can commit to keeping this blog alive, I have to be realistic. I'm fairly certain that I can manage two posts each for January and February, using Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestor prompts for 2024, so that is my commitment for now. Sometime in mid-February, I'll see where things are and plan from there.

Again, Happy New Year, may it be healthy and genealogically satisfying!