missing records and family stories
Hello Alice, Joseph and others,
Thank you for your encouraging words. After rereading what I posted
Saturday, I must have been extra stressed out that day. No, civil
marriage certificates from San Francisco do not list parents - that
would have been too easy!
My father, now deceased, had passed down a rather fantastic family
story about his father's side, about two elder brothers getting
together to disinherit a much younger brother and then seeing to it
that important records were destroyed...and then in turn the youngest
brother disinherited his own son (my grandfather).
Very reluctantly, I'm now beginning to believe that this 'fantastic
family story' might be based on fact. Why reluctantly? Because to
most genealogists family stories are just that, stories, and inherently
suspect until proven to be factual. To his dying day my father didn't
believe me when I told him that the tiny, dainty little old lady (on
his maternal side) in the family photograph, the