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I am currently trying to get as far as possible in my Ahnentafel. Thanks to a couple of online sources, I have been able to find a lot of ancestry, google helped me get up to this website which offers information, recorded because that part of my Ahnentafel apparently had some heraldy in it (knights and lords, (very) unfortunately not my genealogy though).

This source links me from father to father to the following source on geneanet which seems to contain a "mythological" family tree, which "proves" my Ahnentafel links to Franconian kings.

Of course this is all pretty darn exciting, but I also find it a bit hard to believe. How legit is a source like this?

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  • Hi, welcome to G&FH.SE! I've edited your question to add links for the websites you cited instead of having the naked links in the question. Please feel free to edit and add the titles of the sites if you'd prefer that.
    – Jan Murphy ♦
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 16:12

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When I was young and getting interested in the family genealogy, I took it upon myself to interview all my great-aunts and uncles who were still alive. They told me wonderful stories which I took notes about (I wish I had a tape recorder at the time) and much of what they said was family folklore, including such wonderful ditties as "we descend from horse thieves" to "your grandmother had 15 siblings who perished in the Ukraine in World War I".

These are stories and are not based on first hand experience, but were passed to them by their parents.

They are all fantastic clues. But they are not yet for me proven.

Like me, you will have to consider any information that does not have some sort of actual source documents to back it up, simply as a lead to help you. So you still must do the research to find those documents to provide enough solid evidence to allow you to conclude that (at least part of) the information is true.

You may in the process find that some of the information is false, and something else is true. And when this happens, it's disappointing to find out you're not related to kings, but in a different way is still very exciting.

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Is “mythological” information relevant? It depends where the information came from.

  1. If you found it online, then no.

  2. If it has been handed down in your family for seven generations, and they considered it dear, then it is part of your family's lore. You might mention their false pride in your family history, but not in your documented genealogical reports.

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    Not everything "online" is irrelevant. Some of it, certainly, but not all.
    – Harry V. ♦
    Commented Sep 29, 2015 at 15:22
  • I have included family stories in questions here that were passed to me by my mother, and I would certainly hope that a distant relative (or anyone) reading them would not dismiss them and instead would seek evidence to support/refute them. I think that first point needs further clarification.
    – PolyGeo ♦
    Commented Sep 30, 2015 at 2:57

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