missing records and family stories

[Gloria Delgado <gloriad@...>]

Hello Alice, Joseph and others,

Thank you for your encouraging words.  After rereading what I posted 
Saturday,  I must have been extra stressed out that day.  No, civil 
marriage certificates from San Francisco do not list parents - that 
would have been too easy!
My father, now deceased, had passed down a rather fantastic family 
story about his father's side, about two elder brothers getting 
together to disinherit a much younger brother and then seeing to it 
that important records were destroyed...and then in turn the youngest 
brother disinherited his own son (my grandfather).
Very reluctantly, I'm now beginning to believe that this 'fantastic 
family story' might be based on fact.  Why reluctantly?  Because to 
most genealogists family stories are just that, stories, and inherently 
suspect until proven to be factual.  To his dying day my father didn't 
believe me when I told him that the tiny, dainty little old lady (on 
his maternal side) in the family photograph, the one he lovingly 
remembered  as his great-grandmother Trini,  wasn't his 
great-grandmother after all, but her sister, who married his 
great-grandfather after his first wife's death!  And of course this was 
kept a secret because marriage between former in-laws wasn't allowed 
through the Catholic church.  All the documents in the world couldn't 
convince my father that I was right.
What a treacherous road we genealogists tread.  Ideally, we try to have 
the facts fall neatly into place, all names exactly match, and 
everything be verifiable.  But we're dealing with real life, and life 
is not neat.  There should be some way of incorporating or amending an 
asterisk to our lines, which would indicate to all who come later that 
- wait, here is something that checks out or fits or I strongly believe 
to be true, but remains to be proven with that elusive piece of paper.  
 Until then, sometimes all we have are our family stories.
Gloria