52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week 1 - FAMILY LORE

Family lore is like that old game of telephone. It gets passed on in bits and pieces, and it ends up garbled and bearing no resemblance to the truth. Of course, that’s IF it gets passed on at all.

My family didn’t pass on a lot of tales. We weren’t close to most of the family on my mom’s and my dad’s sides, so maybe we missed out on the tales. But I remember hearing three pieces of family lore when I was younger. The first was that the family came west with Daniel Boone, the second was that someone in the family killed the last Indian in southern Illinois, and the last was that one of the relatives was a forest ranger in the “Old Country.” 

Proving family lore can be complicated since it’s often untrue. But sometimes, there are bits of fact buried in the lore. Take the story that our family came west with Daniel Boone. As near as I can tell, it's not true. But a couple of things may have led to the story. First, several family members followed Daniel Boone’s trail into Kentucky. As far as I can tell, none came into contact with Daniel Boone. Some Quaker relatives traveled west from North Carolina but have no known connection to Daniel Boone’s Quaker roots. 

My 3rd, 4th, and 5th great-grandfathers were named John Rains and traveled to Tennessee. There was a famous Tennessean, an early settler of Nashville, and one of the “long hunters” named John Rains. Although both Rains families originally came from Virginia, I’ve not yet found a connection. Perhaps past families confused the “famous” John Rains with our ordinary, hardworking farmer John Rains. This confusion might explain how the family lore developed. 

As far as the rumor that a family member killed the last native American in southern Illinois, that’s one story I’m happy to say I’ve found no proof of. I do have family who arrived in early Franklin County, Illinois, but by the time they arrived, the Native Americans had already been driven off. There were a few stragglers that crossed through the area. But there are very few mentions of encounters and no mention of killings. I have several relatives who fought in the Black Hawk War in 1832. Perhaps the tale developed from a war story yet to be discovered. 

The last piece of family lore I’d heard was that one relative was a “forest ranger” in the mountains in the "old country". I’m still trying to track this one down. I have a couple of lines who may have lived in more mountainous areas in Austria and Czechoslovakia. But I haven’t researched enough to find their jobs before they immigrated, and I’m not even sure what the term “forest ranger” means. Once in the United States, most were coal miners, not farmers or timber workers. 

Family lore often gets people interested in the lives of their ancestors. Proving or disproving it is often challenging, but the research can be fun.