To use a family legacy, however, you need to know how to evaluate your family stories. Interviews with three top genealogists, Desmond Walls Allen, Elizabeth Kerstens, and Kay Freilich, explain how to do just that. These genealogists offer advice on gathering, writing, and validating legends in family history.

"Don’t dismiss out-of-hand legends you hear, they could be true," advises Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, editor of APG Quarterly. "My grandmother told me a bunch of stories, and many of them have proved to be bogus. But one time I asked her if she knew when her grandmother died, and she said, ‘Oh, yes, I was ten and we were living in the house in Park Ridge, Illinois.’" Kerstens located the death certificate for her great-great grandmother, and found that she had died at that time and in that house.

In an article recently published by Ancestry Magazine (March/April 1999, pp. 60-63), Kerstens presents an example of the validity of family legends. She illustrates how records largely substantiated a generations-long story of her husband’s Irish forebears. The account came down intact through several lines that didn’t initially know about each other.

Kay Freilich, director of the Federation of Genealogical Societies, agrees with Kerstens. "In ninety-five percent of the cases that I’ve worked on, there has been at least an element of truth. Dates and timelines get garbled the most, but relationships and stories involving them tend to be accurate.

"We had a story floating around about how my maternal grandmother met my maternal grandfather. Many years later, I heard exactly the same story from one of her sisters. There’s not a fact in the story that can be documented, but to hear it from two different sources in different times and different places is significant."

Desmond Walls Allen, owner of Arkansas Research, warns that in a story involving distant generations, confusion will intrude over the characters involved. A great-grandmother can be one of four people.

In her brother-in-law’s family, Allen says, "they had the name Mulberry Melinda, and they just knew that she was on one particular line. But we didn’t find her there. My sister and I researched it, hoping to find her in a different direction. There showed up Mulberry Melinda. She wasn’t the great-grandmother on the line the family thought she was, she was on a different line."

"Pay attention to the overall story. Don’t zero in on specifics. You have to think of family legends in these terms: If it’s not literally true, where did it come from and what might be true?" advises Allen.

She recalls that she heard her Grandma Moffitt died the year of the Arkansas flood. Knowing about the great 1927 flood, Allen says, "I went on a wild goose chase in the records of 1927, and I couldn’t turn her up. But they also had a flood in 1923–that was the year she died."

Freilich says, "In family stories it’s easy to say ‘three years later,’ and really it was five years later. But often you can get into a deed or census to prove it’s just off by that much."

Allen, an award-winning genealogy instructor, points out that if records can correct legends, sometimes legends can trump records. This is particularly so if the story is based on firsthand information. "In my case, there is a record on a collateral line where someone is listed as the father of record, and he isn’t. And the family story describes why he isn’t and couldn’t be."

"Before I got that story [on the Irish forebears], I didn’t know anything about the background of my husband’s great-great grandfather Charles Doherty," says Kerstens. "And that one story is what led me to getting this particular line back to AD 800.

"That’s the value of family legends–they’re a bridge to the past. You may not be able to cross that bridge with any other piece of evidence," notes Kerstens.

While she received the Doherty story in written form, Kerstens advises family historians not to reject legends simply because they are oral. "People can stretch the truth with a pencil as well as they can with their mouth," adds Freilich.

Kerstens explains that Ireland possessed two kinds of storytellers–one type told local histories, the other told myths. "In the people’s minds, they were completely separate types of people. There was an expectation that when the myth type of storyteller would start talking, it would be a long story and they’d have all these pictures painted in their minds. But when the other guy started talking, they would be reminiscing on local tradition and it would be more factual and shorter." They distinguished between the factual and the mythical in their oral traditions, says Kerstens.

"If a legend had been written down a century ago, I would tend to give a little more validity to that. It doesn’t mean it was a true story when it was written, but it means it hasn’t been filtered through as many generations," says Allen.

While holding that oral legends can be reliable, Allen further warns that some kinds of family stories beg to be exaggerated. "When someone starts telling about how old someone was, every time the story gets told, they were older.

"My great-grandmother was telling me about her great-grandmother and she said, ‘She lived to be 115.’ Of course she didn’t! The newspaper account said she was well over one hundred [when she died]. When you do the math, and you find her as a young woman in the 1850 census, she was in her late nineties." Later censuses backed up Allen’s theories about her ancestor’s age.

Adventure stories also expand in the telling. In my family history, we have a story about a father and son in Norway who fought a bear in about 1850. The son survived, although he was badly scarred, but the father died of his bear-inflicted injuries. My great-uncle Oswald told this story, which he had heard from people close to the episode, and he translated it from a local Norwegian history book.

I’m sure a bear fight took place, probably even at the edge of "Long Swamp west of the Randberg Range," as reported. But some details from Oswald’s translation seem suspect: "The bear now struck the rifle a tremendous blow, sending it flying, and closed with its tormentor, John [Velta], underneath and pinned. He summoned his strength and was able to reverse their positions, with the bear underneath, and brought his knife into play, but this was soon flipped from his hand." No wonder the legend describes Velta as "a rugged giant of a man!"

The legend offers sparse factual information, other than a name and location that we had from other, more reliable sources. Its usefulness appears limited. We can’t confirm the story and it doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know about some distant ancestors.

"We can’t get to know our ancestors if we can’t understand the kind of environment they lived in," Kerstens says about my bear story. "These days, if you go to conferences or you read articles [on genealogy], the speakers and writers are trying to encourage people to put meat on the bones of their ancestors."

Freilich recounts a legend in her family that also contains few facts, but adds much color. "We have a story that Abraham Lincoln split rails on a great-great grandfather’s farm. I can only prove that they were living in the same place at that time. We haven’t found any business records or ledger books to show that Abraham Lincoln was ever paid by my great-great grandfather. But I can prove from stories of Lincoln that he was in that town, and I can prove from census records that my great-great grandfather was in the town at the same time and was a farmer. And I write it that way."

Both Freilich and Kerstens recommend using local histories to flesh out thin legends. Freilich gives a lecture entitled "Grandma Told Me" in which she advises her listeners to go beyond genealogy departments and investigate local histories and old pamphlets and newspapers to support their stories.

"If you read a history of an area that somebody lived in who might have had something to do with a legend," says Kerstens, "you might find some part of the story in that history."

Allen observes, however, that if an unrelated person wrote up your family legend, that account could prove less reliable than your own family sources. "When the story is about your family, I think you pay more attention."

While all these assorted legends furnish both color and underpinnings for your family’s book, the occasional story does prove false. Can it have value?

Kerstens’ grandmother told her they had an ancestor buried next to Daniel Boone (see Ancestry, November/December 1998, p. 66). "She swore there was some ancestor that she went to visit the grave of when she was a kid," says Kerstens. "I did concentric circles from Daniel Boone’s grave out and never found a single person in any line that I’m researching. Then, they came out with a book on that cemetery and there isn’t anybody."

In that Ancestry article, Kerstens writes, "Disproving family stories is just as important as proving them."

You can, however, include even fictitious legends in your family history, provided you explain that’s what they are. "You ought to try and see how much validity there is to family stories," advises Kerstens. "If you find there’s no validity, you can present it as a family legend that has no validity. Or, if you find it’s true, then great, you give the story, and you say, ‘This is what’s true.’"

With your family legends, explain what’s true and what’s false, what’s proven and unproven, and write down how you arrived at your conclusions. Don’t mislead your readers or a future family historian, advise these three top genealogists.

"You should be very specific," says Freilich, who serves as the book review editor for Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine.

In the case that legends can’t be proved or disproved, Allen recommends writing a disclaimer like this: "This is one of grandpa’s favorite stories. He told it repeatedly and I’ve written it down as he told it, but I can’t support it with facts.

"Or," she adds, "you can just say what the story was, who told the story, and what your research was."

Allen recommends that if you have different renditions of the same family story, record all of them and list the comparisons and contrasts. "In order to do this, you have to first write down your version so it’s not contaminated by the hearing of another version. After you hear the other version and write it down, start comparing specifics about the stories."

"We have a story that there was a shotgun wedding in the family, and it continues that so-and-so was holding the shotgun," Freilich relates. "We would not and we did not, when we wrote our family history, include the story about the shotgun wedding. That’s taking it a little too far. There were living people to consider; you don’t want to hit them over the head with it."

The family history cites the dates involved, when the wedding took place, and the birth of the child six months later. "We didn’t include anything else," says Freilich. "That’s one story that if it dies, it is not going to hurt anybody’s study of our genealogy in the future. We included the dates as they were."

"I definitely feel that the sensitivity to living people is paramount," agrees Allen. "If great-grandpa was a horse thief, it’s funny. But if someone’s dad went to the penitentiary, it’s not funny."

She recommends another omission when writing up family stories: sermonizing. "What I’ve seen a lot of people do when they try to write a family story, is to turn it into a morality play. At the bottom, it says: ‘And therefore, you should never run through the graveyard at night’."

Just tell the story, says Allen. "In a lot of the personal reminiscences or narratives I’ve seen that people have sent me, they’ll try to write in some kind of moral to the story. And with family legends, a lot of times there just isn’t one."

Once you have selected and composed your family stories, what’s the best way to organize them in your book?

If the story involves extensive lines and numbers of people, write it up as a separate chapter, says Kerstens. With her Doherty story, she says, "It’s hard to put it with one person, because there are so many people mentioned. I think it merits its own chapter. It’s interesting enough, and I think the whole thing about that story, that it came down in separate generations intact, is fascinating in itself."

Give references to the separate chapter in the narratives about the people involved, Allen suggests. "You might say, for example, they moved from Ireland, and there’s an interesting story about them: See chapter eight."

When a story revolves around just one family, however, you can include it with that family’s information.

To make the presentation of these legends more inviting, Freilich suggests including photos of related artifacts. "It’s very nice if you can tie them to an artifact in the family–a spoon, a picture, jewelry, whatever it might be," she says. "I think it’s always good if you have something tangible like that."

By presenting and preserving your family stories in book form, you ensure their accuracy and survival. Allen concludes, "Legends can disappear in no time, or they can be altered to where they don’t resemble what somebody else heard. They need to be committed to paper in some form."