Mysteries in the family
Is the family story true?
Every family has a story that has been told so often nobody questions it. Some are true. Some are half-true. Some began as a guess a hundred years ago. The records can usually tell which.
Test a family legend
Choose the story your family tells.
Pick a story above to see what the records usually say about it, and how we would test yours.
Tradition What families say. An inspector couldn’t spell it, so he wrote down something easier, and that became the family name.
Document What the records usually show. Ellis Island inspectors did not write names down; they checked arrivals against passenger lists made at the port of departure. Names did change, often, but usually years later and by the family itself: at naturalization, at work, at school, or simply over time.
How we test it
- Find the passenger list: it shows the name as written where the journey began.
- Find the naturalization papers, which often record both the old name and the new one.
- Follow the name census by census to see when the new spelling first appears.
Reading The change almost always happened. Ellis Island almost never did it.
Tradition What families say. A lord, a king, a governor or a famous founder sits at the top of the tree.
Document What the records usually show. Some of these are true. Many began as a name match: someone of the right surname, in roughly the right place, adopted into the tree a century ago and copied forward until it looked like fact.
How we test it
- Test the line one link at a time, starting with the most recent. Every parent–child joint needs its own record.
- Find who first printed the claim, and what they cited.
- Check the famous person’s documented children against the one the family claims.
Reading Worth testing. Usually the line breaks at one particular joint, and finding it is a story in itself.
Tradition What families say. A grandmother or great-grandmother was a Native princess, often said to be Cherokee.
Document What the records usually show. The Cherokee Nation did not have princesses, and the story is so widespread that historians treat it as a family-legend pattern of its own. Some families do have Native ancestry, and the records that show it are specific: tribal rolls, agency censuses and treaty and allotment papers.
How we test it
- Name the ancestor and place her in a census, with the people around her.
- Search the tribal rolls of the place and period (for the Cherokee: the Dawes and Guion Miller rolls, and the earlier rolls before them).
- A DNA test cannot show tribal membership; only the records and the nation itself can.
Reading The princess is almost never real. The ancestor sometimes is, and deserves to be found properly.
Tradition What families say. Three brothers arrived on one ship: one went north, one went south and one went west.
Document What the records usually show. It is one of the most common stories in American family lore. Sometimes there were three brothers. Often there were three men of the same surname who were not related at all, later joined together to explain why the name turns up in different places.
How we test it
- Find each man separately in the passenger lists, censuses and land records.
- Look for a document that names them as brothers: a will, a deed, a probate file.
- For male lines, a Y-DNA test can say whether their descendants share a father at all.
Reading Often half-true: the men were real; the brotherhood is the part to test.
Tradition What families say. Everything was lost in the fire, so there is no point looking.
Document What the records usually show. Courthouses did burn, and records were lost. But deeds were often re-recorded afterward by the owners, and copies survive in state archives, churches, newspapers, tax rolls, military files and the records of neighboring counties.
How we test it
- Find out exactly which years and which books were lost: it is rarely everything.
- Look for deeds re-recorded after the fire.
- Go around it: state census, tax lists, church registers, newspapers, pension files.
Reading The fire is usually real. “No records at all” almost never is.
Tradition What families say. The family has always spelled it exactly this way, so anyone spelled differently is not ours.
Document What the records usually show. Spelling was not fixed until well into the 1900s. Clerks wrote what they heard, and the same man can appear under three spellings in three records. Searching only one spelling is the commonest reason a family “can’t be found”.
How we test it
- Search every spelling you can say aloud the same way.
- Use Soundex, the code old census indexes were built on (it is in our toolkit).
- Judge a record by the people, place and dates around the name, not by the spelling.
Reading Nearly always untrue, and nearly always the key to finding the family again.
These are patterns, not verdicts. Your family’s story is its own case, and the records decide it.
A mystery from the published record
The Lord Baltimore bride
Compiled In 1925 a printed family history said that John Chenoweth, a colonial blacksmith, married Mary Calvert, of the line of the Lords of Baltimore, and that the couple settled by the Gunpowder River in Baltimore County, Maryland. Families have repeated it ever since.
Document The records of the time tell a plainer story. A tax roll of 1737 lists John and his family on leased land in Back River Upper Hundred; there is no record of him ever owning land in Baltimore County. He made his will in Frederick County, Virginia, on 11 April 1746. And no document of the period has been found that even proves his wife’s surname was Calvert.
Reading The noble bride is a tradition, not a record. The Chenoweth family’s own researchers reached the same conclusion: in their words, the tradition is “not supported by known facts.” The real John Chenoweth, a blacksmith on rented ground, is the more interesting man.
Sources: Cora C. Hiatt, History of the Chenoweth Family (1925); “The First Family,” chenowethsite.com, which sets out the tax roll, the will and the tradition. Settled by the family’s own researchers; shown here because it is the pattern exactly.
Bring us your family’s story
Tell us the story exactly as it was told to you, who told it, and anything written down. We will record it word for word, find what the records say, and tell you honestly which parts hold up.
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