Dusting off family legends

#52ancestors Week 33
Aug. 13-19 Family Legend

Dusting off family legends

 By Myra Vanderpool Gormley ©2018 

One of the favorite American genealogy legends — 3 brothers came to America — is not found in my family. At least I’ve never heard it. I suspect that is because our multi-ethnic family has been in this country longer than our family’s memories about who the gateway ancestors were. 

There are no “stowaways” or “they changed our name at Ellis Island” tales either. Since Ellis Island didn’t open until 1892 and all of our known ancestors arrived in the 1600s and early 1700s, that legend would have been easy to disprove. However, like so many American families, ours has its shares of the popular genealogical legends, which include:

 • Horse thief

 • Indian heritage

 • Fortune left in “old country”

 • Name “change” (because of family disagreement)

 • Claim to fame via Daniel Boone, Jesse James, etc.

 • Wrong ethnic background 

Proving the horse thief was fairly easy since I started out knowing his name (Cole Shoemake), where he lived (Oklahoma) and the time period (early 20th century). It helped that his escapades were written up in several newspapers and that the Leavenworth, Kansas prison had records (and a picture) of him. It took a bit of digging to figure out the exact relationship, which turned out to be half 1C2R. Half first cousins are still family, of course. Does that mean I have a half black sheep relative? 

The Cherokee legends were handed down in several different lines — just to confuse us, I think. Great-grandpa’s Guion Miller application is so higgledy-piggledy that I wonder if the old Baptist preacher might have been imbibing when he filled it out. A number of family tales fell apart in the cold daylight of historical accuracies and basic genealogical research, but one line did prove to be Cherokee, but it was not among any of the passed-along legends. It was found almost by accident. 

My maternal grandfather believed the “inheritance in the old country” story and I never determined how he learned about it, but suspect it might have been one of those 1920s or 1930s inheritance scams stories that often appeared in U.S. newspapers. What threw cold water on this legend for me was the claim that the family fortune was in England. My grandfather’s family were primarily Swiss, German and Irish. If there’s any English in his line, it must be back in the 1500s and not yet identified. 

This family also has the proverbial family dispute tale in which two brothers had a disagreement and split up their business (and what that was varies from storyteller to storyteller) and one of them “changed” their name from Fricks to Frix. Changing the spelling doesn’t change the name, but you can’t tell my family that. Many years of research into this Southern line has failed to turn up the feuding brothers and the nearest I’ve come to finding anything is when my great-grandaunt Julia Fricks married her first cousin once removed (1C1R) Alexander Frix, but they both descend from the same ancestor of a Rowan County, North Carolina Germanic Swiss Fricks (Frick) family — no matter how they spell it. 

Many Jesse James (the outlaw) stories and kinship tales to him abound in families, especially those with roots in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas. I was able to disprove one of the legends about our grandfather catching Jesse James burying train robber loot on his Oklahoma farm with just one trip to the library (this, of course, was many years before Wikipedia). Jesse James was killed on 2 April 1882 in Missouri. My grandpa was an 8.5-year-old boy in Georgia when that happened — long before he removed to Oklahoma and purchased a farm. Nevertheless, I have some cousins who can’t see the flaw in this legend and are passing it on to their grandchildren. 

Oops. Wrong ethnic group. When I was growing up I wondered why dad always emphasized that we were “Holland Dutch.” Didn’t all Dutch come from Holland (or more properly, The Netherlands)? Evidently this is how his ethnic origins had been related to him, along with the family legend of coming from New York. Apparently Holland Dutch was to distinguish them from the German Dutch (Deutsche). 

My maternal grandmother would rattle off the various ethnic combinations in her family as French, Black Dutch, Irish, Scotch-Irish, Welsh and English — way back there (whatever that meant). She didn’t know what Black Dutch meant either, but that’s another story. Eventually, I learned the distinction between Irish and Scotch-Irish (the latter is an Americanism). 

My paternal grandmother wasn’t sure what ethnicity her family roots were and it took years to discover her mother’s maiden name (Lee). However, her paternal line, with a very English-sounding surname (Kimbro/Kimbrough), turned out to be German. According to family legend, our Kelly line was “originally O’Kelly” and Irish. Appears this legend may bite the dust also as research continues. Another purportedly English line turned out to be Swedish (Bankston); and the jury is still out on whether the Andersons on the family tree are Scottish, Swedish or Norwegian. My numerous lines known as Pennsylvania Dutch are not Dutch at all. They are German. 

I am such a mixed bag of ethnic mixtures and I have learned to keep an open mind about the validity of any of my family legends. Recently, I found a potential ancestor of yet another ethnic group to add to the mixture — she’s Italian. Mama Mia.