Family stories

Family stories and traditions can be a valuable source of family history, but often they are wrong or have been deformed in the transmission of one generation to another.

Four exemples coming out of my own genealogy :

- my maternal grandfather, Joannes Franciscus Neukermans  told me - more than once - that his family originated in the Wetteren-Serskamp region. My research showed that he was referring to the family of his maternal grandfather, not to his paternal grandfather (which is what I had always understood).
The explanation for this erroneus belief may have been that my grandfather never knew his own paternal grandfather Amandus who died young :  my great-grandfather Hermilianus was a baby when his father passed away - and hat my grandfather's paternal grandmother Catharina Asselman died in the late eighteen hundreds while he was a young child. On the other side, my grandfather's  maternal grandparents Karel Bernard Broeckaert and Joanna CatharinaVan de Perre lived a (very) long life and had the opportunity to transmit parts of their families' history.

- my maternal grandfather  also told me that one of his ancestors, at the time of the French revolution, was leaving the house to buy a peace of land out of the neormous ecclesiastical goods which had been confiscated by the government of that day, and that his wife  drew him back by the rim of his coat stating that she would not allow him to condemn his soul to eternal fire by buying these goods which had been stolen by Satan's accomplices. There is not a chance in hell (excuse the pun) that I shall ever be able to control the veracity of that story ...

- my paternal grandmother Rosalia Margaretha Ravijst said that she descended from a French soldier of Napoleon who remained here after the wars. That was the explanation she gave for her not very common name. I haven't progressed far enough in her ascendancy to formally state that this story is false, but my indications are that it is almost impossible.
Still,  I ask myself how it came to pass that she had a commemorative medal of a German prince of the revolutionary period. I have the medal now : its is not valuable - it is beaten out of a tin-like metal.

- on the other side, there is the story which was told by the wife of my paternal grandmother's brother, according to which the Timmermans (no relations of hers!) were rich but degenerated and spoil-sick merchants who delapidated their fortune in one generation in th eighteent century, proved true except for a couple of details : the spoilsick generation was not in the Timmermans line but in a maternal line leading to my great-great-grandfather's wife Maria Anna Van den Houte, second wife of Karel Timmermans. And that spoilsick branch were not rich merchants, but  minor gentry. All the other details of her story proved correct.

Later I understood where my great-aunt got this story : she was a descendant of a Van den Houte herself.

In this post I have omitted the data of birth and death -the text is difficult enough to read as it is, and all these data have been posted on my blogs on earlier occasions.