Quite a few of ours always turn out to have some truths in them. I never completely write the oral stories off as I find that there's usually some grains of truth which have been mixed up over time when its been orally passed down.
Two off the top my head, my grandmother in law ( hubby's grandmother) was told by her father that her mother had been killed by a horse running over her in the street( she died when grandmother in law was just 2 yr old , so no very clear recollection of her mother's death at the time.) .
A couple of years after my hubby's
grandmother passed on ( who I knew too and she always told me too her mother
was killed by a horse running over her), I ordered her mother's death cert expecting to see a horse accident as cause of death - nope, she died of just heart disease, no horse , no anything, except plain ole heart disease. I found it odd at the time why on earth would her father lie to her, and make up a story about a horse killing her mum.
Then a couple of years later , I found out where the horse must have come into it .
I came across an article in the newspapers when grandmother's mother was just a toddler . She was playing in the middle of street - A horse and cart hit her . Itsaid she was in serious condition and had broken several bones from the incident, where it states she was rushed to hospital.
Maybe grandmother's mother suffered serious health problems all her life after this horse and cart accident when she was a toddler( she was only in her 20s when she died from heart disease, very young to have heart disease, so perhaps her husband, grandmother's father, told his daughter it was this horse that killed her and maybe grandmother took it quite literally.) .
Another one ,my father in law always said there was a monk ( as in monks in a monastery) in his family, but couldn't remember his name, just that it was one of his grandfather's lot, and he thought it was one of his grandfather's brothers that went off to be a monk.
I never found this monk of his ( all the brothers and so on I traced - no monks anywhere , or anyone that disappeared of the face of the earth lol) , BUT I did find that his grandfather's wife's ( my father in laws step grandmother) sister married the local Reverend.
I think it's highly likely that father in law's step G uncle Reverend is his so called "monk " lol
. ( father in law was eccentric at the best of times lol. It's like sifting through all the grains to get to the truths amongst those grains)
Kind regards