Anne Pemberton wrote, referring to a post of mine:
I keep thinking of the story of the gold buttons told on this list recently
and thinking how silly it was to dismiss the story because no evidence of
the gold buttons still exists. It seems likely that after the country
stabilized, the man may have converted the button back into money, or may
have had the buttons made into jewelry for wife, daughters and
grand-daughters, and male family members as well.
----

Obviously Anne did not understand what I wrote.

It would be ludicrous to demand that I produce gold buttons to verify my
relatives' claim that our ancestor melted his money down into buttons in
order to escape the French Revolution. There are millions of reasons why
those buttons do not exist now, but the main reason is that they DID NOT
EXIST in the first place.

What I said was that if I HAD found buttons (counterfactual), they would
have tended to corroborate an oral tradition. Without them, one would have
to seek other evidence to confirm the story. It is even sillier to say that
an absence of buttons could verify the claim. [Taking us back to
Hemings/Jefferson, where an absence of DNA evidence is being used to make a
claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered any or all of Sally Hemings's
children.]

I do not rely on an absence of buttons to disprove the oral claim. I have
found numerous written records showing that the purported emigre was born in
Quebec, that his parents were born in Quebec, that his grandparents were
born in Quebec, and that at least some of his great-grandparents and
great-great-grandparents were born in France and immigrated to Quebec. As
that was 150+ years before the French Revolution, I am not inclined to
believe that the "emigre" was a French nobleman who "escaped" the Revolution
with or without buttons. The oral history of my family, like many other (not
all) oral traditions, is a lovely fantasy.

If I had found that the man was born in France, had a distinctively
aristocratic name, owned vast properties in France or Quebec, or was found
in records of the royal court, those things (I hasten to make clear that NO
SUCH EVIDENCE has been uncovered) would corroborate the oral history.

If Anne's leaps to false conclusions are evidence of her teaching skills, I
am glad my children are past an age when they might have been subjected to
her ministrations. I  hope that she merely read too hastily and drew faulty
conclusions.

Kathleen Much
The Book Doctor

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