In denial?

[zetlander]

For years my neighbour has been telling me /bragging?? about her grandfather who she said was a very wealthy mill owner in Yorkshire.

Knowing my interest in family history she asked me to do some searching on her behalf.
What became apparent was that her grandfather was anything but wealthy or a mill-owner. The grandfather, a  miner, and the family were living in South Wales at the time of the birth of my neighbours mother.

But the neighbour is having none of it - reckons I've got it completely wrong  --  the mill owner may have gone to South Wales on business  --   perhaps her grandmother may have been up in Yorkshire and had a liaison with the owner

Anyone else come across this type of denial?

[groom]

So she would prefer that her mother was the illegitimate daughter of a mill owner rather than the daughter of a miner?

Has she got her mother's birth certificate as surely that would give her father's name and occupation?

Sometimes these stories passed down in the family are so engrained that people don't want to believe that they aren't true.

[Ayashi]

Could it be a different grandfather and she's got confused? Or a slightly different relative? (I have a tendency to forget whether my mother's recollections are "my grandmother" or "your grandmother" when she talks, which is obviously the difference of a generation.)

Something this recent is odd, especially if she knew him personally. If people who knew him have this story of a mill owner in Yorkshire and a complete stranger says "no, he was a poor guy from Wales" I'd probably be inclined to believe the family story as well. It seems like a very strange difference.

[groom]

I think you/she need to get het mother's birth and marriage certificates as that should clear things up.

[Milliepede]

She would have had two grandfathers so, as Ayashi suggests, maybe it was the other one?

I would research that one as well just in case.

[groom]

She would have had two grandfathers so, as Ayashi suggests, maybe it was the other one?

I would research that one as well just in case.

I agree, family stories do get confused. My mother and her twin sister were certain that they had three cousins - Donald, David and Sydney who went to Australia when Mum and her sister were about 12. My mother said she could remember saying goodbye and that they were on her mother's side of the family. It took me 3 years to track them down and then I found they were in fact the children of her father's brother and that they didn't all go to Australia in 1932, only one went then, the rest followed years later.

[Rena]

I have an early 19th century marriage record that states the bride's father was a miller in Yorkshire.  I assumed he worked in a local windmill grinding corn.  However, when the early census was published I discovered he was a labourer in a local coal mine.

Just recently I came across an online account of a Yorkshire Pottery that has been long gone and the father is named as the foreman in a slate mill.  I'd never heard of such a thing as a slate mill but apparently powdered slate is/was used in the making of fine porcelain.

[Andrew Tarr]

I agree, family stories do get confused.

Family folklore said my gt-grandfather died in Anglesey in 1877 because of some connection with the Penmon lifeboat (at least, that is how I understood it).  That happened when my grandmother was 8 years old, and she died when I was 23.

When I came to collect facts forty years later I found from the death cert. that he had died of typhoid, which is not usually contracted from sea water.  I also found a newspaper report that six months earlier he and a friend had been rescued while fishing from a small islet near Penmon, where he managed a quarry.  Because of his sudden death the quarrymen were not paid, and a dispute resulted which his brother-in-law had to sort out.

[panda40]

My grandmother swore that her great grandfather came from France and changed his surname from Leniour to Linnett to make it English sounding. The truth is he left his wife and kids in Northamptonshire traveled to Kent with his brother set up in a marriage of convenience and went on to produce the family she is descended from. Sadly she never got to see the evidence of this little white lie.
Regards panda