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 ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html