Anne Pemberton wrote:
some will reject the authority of oral history
because it is oral history and not written down.

No, some will reject it if it cannot be verified independently. Oral history
should be "triangulated" with other evidence before it is accepted lock,
stock, and barrel.

In my own family, I have disproved several lovely, romantic tales passed
down through as many as six generations. My favorite is the one about a
"French nobleman" who barely escaped the Revolution with his gold melted
down and made into buttons sewn on his clothes. Unfortunately for the
storyteller, though, I traced him to his birth in Quebec, in the fourth
generation of his line to be born there. None of them was noble, none of
them appears to have escaped from anywhere, none of them was noticeably
wealthy.

I'm still looking for any evidence that Elizabeth McCraft (my
4g-grandmother) was "captured by pirates while walking along a beach on the
coast of Scotland in the time when Barbary pirates were actively marauding
there and sold into indentured servitude in Virginia," according to family
legend. James Acton, "recognizing her merit, purchased her freedom and
married her." This tale is just barely possible, but I have found not one
shred of proof, so I'm putting it in the "not verified" file.

Henry Wiencek has properly noted that we know nothing whatsoever about what
Sally Hemings did or did not tell her children. Even if we did, we would
need some independent evidence to verify it. We don't have that either. Let
it rest.

Kathleen Much
The Book Doctor

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