I think this is mainly a southern little-old-lady phenomenon, dying out now, but so popular in earlier times. Although why you’d want to dig too deep into your ancestry is beyond me – I doubt it’s very seldom good news. More than likely, you’ll find out your forbearers were hung for horse thievin’, or something worse.
It seems to me that the ladies involved in this just knew that being southern was so special, there just had to be something important in our history. Most of us didn’t have a lot of money before 1865, much less after it, but we had such good manners, etc, we just HAD to be special.
My grandmother spent hours & hours on research. She came up with the following:
- We somehow owned a great part of St. Louis, even tho nobody I ever heard of in the family had ever set foot in St. Louis
- We were related to the young man in the Blue Boy painting, although what advantage that would give you was never clear to me. He doesn’t look like he’s kin to us, anyway.
- She traced “Our People” to landing in America in Georgia. I guess it never crossed her mind that Georgia was originally populated by former English prison occupants.
- And the worst one: I lived for years in Vicksburg, MS, which was the site of an important Civil War battle and siege. She proudly once told me that I had an ancestor who ‘fell’ fighting in Vicksburg. Now this was interesting! She continued “Oh, yes, but it was a big mistake – he was coming right back!” In other words, he’d taken one look at the U.S. Grant and the Yankee Army, and decided that going back across the MS River from whence he’d come was a doggone good idea, and got shot in the back.
I asked Grandmother to stop telling me about things she looked up after that.
