Author: Donald Guenther
Uploaded: 10/25/2013
Our family had their share of skeletons. At one point my brother Bob complained that he couldn’t take hearing about any more. You’ve heard of double closets, well our family had a walk-in closet full of skeletons. Coupled with skeletons we grew hearing some very colorful stories and later began to question their authenticity.
The Stories we Grew up on
My hero had been the great civil war General Stonewall Jackson, an ancestor of ours through my mother’s side. We had his initialed prayer book he carried through the war which we donated to a museum. His death struck a powerful blow to the confederate side. We felt bad that he died of pneumonia and not in battle. I especially liked him because I’d lost a toe and he an arm.
I learned about a Great Great aunt helping cheer up U.S. solders getting ready to go overseas to fight in the First World War, the Great War. She fell in love with one of the men and got engaged. A few days later she fell in love with another and got engaged again. She decided with the death rate being so high she needed to hedge her bet on the back end. As luck would have it the men met on the boat. One described his finance to the other who replied that she sure sounded like his girl. They compared pictures. My aunt received two Dear John letters in the same envelope.
Another of our great aunts had been on the Titanic. She went to get into a life raft, slipped, and William Burke caught her. She returned to the ship to freshen up bit before getting into a small boat with such distinguished men as Burke. She has never been heard from since.
Debunking the Fairy Tails
As we grew older and learned more about our ancestry we desired to know if these stories were true. We enlisted our oldest brother Ron to find out the truth. Ron had proven himself capable when he traced our linage back to thirteenth century Germany. We are descendants of the German god Horakhty. No one could argue against starting at the top.
Ron began with the Stonewall Jackson story. He knew the prayer book portion to be true because he once took the book to school for show and tell. He compared our family tree and dates with the birth date of Stonewall Jackson. He determined for our family to be related Jackson had to have fathered a child at 6 years old. Not too likely.
Next he looked into the Titanic passenger list. He began with 1st class hoping for the best. Finding nothing he moved through the classes and found no family last names matching ours. The story proved false.
Finally he dug into the lives of our aunts. No aunt had helped the solders prepare for the Great War. We had an uncle that fought in the war and we had some soverers but no aunts involved.
As Ron studied each story he found something the stories all had in common. The stories originated from the same Great Great Aunt. Ron’s conclusion is that our great aunt had lied to us. We had an aunt adding skeletons to an already full closet. The aunt herself has now became part of the family skeletons. Ron won’t tell us her name out of respect for the dead.