A Family Pattern: Tall Tales

I’ve adapted Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge.
Each week I follow my children’s ahnentafel numbering to select the featured ancestor, ensuring no one through the mid–sixth generation is left behind.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: 2026 Week 13: A Family Pattern

Introduction

My assigned Week 13 ancestor is Rose Carey Anderson—my grandmother—and the family pattern I associate most strongly with her is a little light-hearted: tall tales.

Discussion

As soon as I developed a love for family history, my grandmother Rose was eager to regale me with family story after family story.

The problem is, they were all tall tales.

The baby brother who died in a fall down the stairs? Actually polio.

The uncle who disappeared one day, never to be seen again? He had drowned—and his body was brought back to his mother’s house.

The other uncle, the firefighter who died in a fire in the firehouse? (Wow.) Was what the newspapers called a “hobo” and died in a fire in a barn he was crashing in.

Her grandfather who had to leave Ireland or be hung as a horse thief? Almost certainly not.

Grandma’s pattern eventually became clear to me and it became a challenge to disprove each story about the family’s past, and really, I did.

For years, I treated these stories like puzzles, something to investigate and, more often than not, disprove.

But I wasn’t smart enough to put two and two and realize that the tales she told me about the current family might not stand up to examination either.

“F__’s last two children weren’t his.” Maybe. Maybe not.

“C__’s dad wasn’t her dad.” I was not given enough info and will never know.

“M__ was having an affair when he died.” Another thing I’ll never know.

So, I am pretty confident Grandma is looking down on me laughing at the wild goose chases I’ve been on!

And honestly, she’d probably still tell the stories the same way.

Summary

When I was a girl, “Trust but verify” was a popular saying, and it’s something any genealogist worth their research notes would do well to remember.

AI Disclosure

This post was created by me with the help of AI tools. While AI helps organize research, the storytelling and discoveries are my own.

Next Week’s Topic: A Brick Wall Revisited

Changed My Thinking

I’ve adapted Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 ancestors in 52 weeks challenge.

Each week’s post follows my children’s ahnentafel numbering, which determines the featured ancestor.

This ensures no one until mid-sixth generation gets left behind.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: 2026 Week 10: Changed My Thinking

Introduction

My assigned Week 10 ancestor is Samuel Goode (born Gudelski). He married in what is now Lithuania in 1899, and he and his wife Ida had four daughters. According to family stories, the Russian army drafted Sam, and he emigrated alone to the United States.

The intention was to work, earn money, settle in, and then send for his wife and daughters, which he did five years later, in 1912. Ida and their daughters aged 10, 8, 6, and 4 arrived, but Ida was turned away due to an eye infection, something immigration officials feared could be trachoma.

But the girls were allowed in. What was a Jewish scholar – now working as a peddler – to do with four young daughters? He sent Hannah, to his married sister Yetta, and kept the other three.

We will never know Sam’s thinking, why a middle child was sent away and three were kept.

Ida snuck back into the country by 1914 and the family was reunited.  But Hannah carried that heartache throughout her life. While the rest of the family spent their lives in New York (and in one case Pennsylvania), Hannah soon went out to California, where she raised her family, grew old, and died.

Discussion

When I first heard this story, I judged Sam harshly.

How could a father send one child away and keep the others?

But age has changed my thinking. What once seemed like cruelty now feels like an impossible decision made in desperate circumstances.

I didn’t know Hannah, but I knew her sisters, and if she was like them, she didn’t let him off easy.

In the 1910 census, Aunt Yetta and her husband had five children, and by 1915 they had six. I understand they would not have been able to accommodate four young girls.

But my heart breaks for the family whose fracture never fully healed.

Figure 1 Hannah with her husband and daughter

Challenge

Has time given you perspective on the choices others have made?

AI Disclosure

This post was created by me with the help of AI tools. While AI helps organize research, the storytelling and discoveries are my own.

Next Week’s Topic: A Turning Point