The Tricky Business of Oral Family History

Oral traditions can be a very important source of leads when researching your family's history. However, relying on them without backing them up with solid primary sources can lead to disaster, as seen by the recent controversy surrounding the First Nations ancestry of several prominent Canadians, including Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond or Michelle Latimer, the director of the CBC "Trickster" series.

I ran into a similar situation when working on the family history of a US friend whose family oral tradition claimed that her "Fox" ancestors were of Native American descent. Well, once I started following the paper trail it quickly transpired that nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, it turned out that her "Fox" ancestors were instead descended from true blue, "Daughters of the American Revolution", very early settlers to Connecticut in the 17th century. Not only that, but a living male line descendant of those same Connecticut Fox' who has taken a Y-DNA test found himself to be a perfect match to a living descendant of another line of "Fox" in Dorset, England, which in turn could be traced back to one Walter Fox born in Dorset in about 1690. Historically, this makes perfect sense as most of the early settlers to the New England colonies originated in the English counties of Dorset, Somerset and Devon.

You may think that this is the end of the story, but there is another twist. Towards the end of the 19th century one of the Fox men married Charlotte Bassett whose father, Samuel, was a French Canadian who had emigrated to Wisconsin in the middle of the 19th century. It may never be possible to prove it, but I have a strong suspicion that this French Canadian was in fact Métis. So, there may have been something to the family oral tradition after all.