Heroic family stories… we all have them. There’s the one about an ancestor of mine, crossing the Ohio River into Indiana from Kentucky with her children in tow, standing up in that buckboard, fending off “Wild Indians” with her shotgun… never happened. Or from Flo’s side of the family, the uncle’s scar, a facial slash, from one of Rommel’s men while fighting in North Africa–when Eoin wanted to include that tale in a school project, the uncle admitted he was just having fun with a naive younger generation–the scar dated back to a childhood auto accident, from the days of cheap windshields and no seat belts.
During the pandemic, I’ve discovered the joys of at-home research using searchable newspaper archives… and one of the family stories I decided to check out was one I recorded in my blog about memories of the old northside, from ten years ago:
http://johndstanton.blogspot.com/2011/04/memories-of-old-northside.html
“One tale I do not myself remember: I was an infant and my father had just started on the police department—my mother awoke in the middle of the night to fix me a bottle. She heard groaning coming from the alley, and calls for help. She did not want to wake my father, who had just gotten to sleep after a long shift, so she ignored the cries. The next morning, my folks saw police and onlookers crowded into the alley behind the house. About a block away, a man had been caught cheating on his pregnant wife. The couple had a fight, and she stabbed him with a butcher knife. He staggered down the alley crying out for help, and died behind our house. My dad was teased for some time for sleeping through that one.”
The only real discrepancy I could discover in the July 20, 1954 newspaper article, was that she nailed him with “a small paring knife,” rather than a butcher knife. An added juicy tidbit that didn’t make it into the family lore: the wronged wife’s defense was championed and fund-raised by the horndog-husband’s own mother.
One thing you can say about old family memories… the more embarrassing they are, the more likely they are to be true. 😊
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