Since I last posted on this blog, I moved from Arizona to Iowa, I lost a sister, my mother and my grandmother. Oh and I managed to survive 2020 (at least up to the final week of 2020).
When my mother passed earlier this year we hadn't spoken to each other in about 15 years and her passing was very sudden. All of a sudden, I'm next of kin, and had to be responsible for executing her "final" wishes. Talk about being thrown from frying pan into the fire. And the historian in me, made sure that I updated all of her records in my family tree on WikiTree, and Ancestry, as well as my hard copy records. I realized how important it is to have a family oral history, but it needs to be backed up by sourced records (Birth/Marriage/Death certificates, and/or Census records.) For example, my partner grew up with the oral history of being related to Bonnie Parker by way of his grandmother Opal Parker. But the documentation doesn't support it. On my side, the oral history is my great grandfather, was the product of of a "full blooded Cherokee" woman and his father. Again, the documentation doesn't support the Oral history. In both cases, the Oral history has been treated like fact for multiple generations.
But the more I work on genealogy as a whole, the more important I realize how necessary it is to make sure sources are correct. Because sometimes the oral history is flawed, just like people are.
