What to do if the family you're researching for - maybe your own - refuses to BELIEVE that your research is valid?
I've encountered this problem with my own family and with a client, who was not a client for long.
This woman refused to believe my research because the spelling of her surname in the Old Country was not the SAME IDENTICAL SPELLING to the one that she and her parents and grandparents used here in the United States. It was a very rare Eastern European name, one found in a specific region of Eastern Europe, and using phonetics and the European language, it was clear that the American spelling was the way it sounded, not the way it was spelled in that language but still recognizable as the same name, just about 3 letters different. I also found relations of hers that used another spelling from the same region. It was clear to me early on that she would continue to disbelieve and discredit my research and probably not pay me, so I gave up.
I considered this a different kind of lesson. Some people don't want their genealogy researched. She was a psychologist but didn't understand herself on why not she was so closed minded and cut off from her ancestry. I wasn't prepared to go to battle to defend my research to her.
I kept my work. I didn't charge her. I didn't take her phone calls.
Of course I sort of worried that she would not recommend me to her friends but in my life I have found that it's very likely she was friends with the same type of people anyway. Who needed it?
I'm an ardent researcher and aim for accuracy and proof.
When it came to certain members of my own family, I figured that memory failed them.
For publication (with distribution to only be within the family) I provided copies of the various documents and went forward with the truth as I found it. When the difference between the documents and the story that some relation has promoted is vast it probably isn't a good idea to also publish their memory as a sort of folky "We all love Auntie but" story as part of the publication. If it is only slightly off or a reasonable error, sometimes retelling the story and revealing the source is OK and can even add more humanness and charm.
Such as...
"Auntie Love remembered the flood that came through their house as eight feet high, but then Auntie love was only 7 years old when the flood occurred, so though the local papers reported that the river rose three feet, as a seven year old that water was terrifying."
or
"Auntie Love said that she herself named her sister Patience, Patty, but then Patience got born two years before Auntie Love and the name Patricia appears on her birth certificate."
or
"Maxwell remembered seeing his brother home on leave in his Navy whites in 1946, but brother Stanley was discharged honorably from the Navy in 1942."
C 2015 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot
