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Family & Lives · New episodes on Wednesdays
Family Legend Has It
Every family has one story everybody repeats and nobody has checked: the name changed at Ellis Island, the bootlegger grandpa, the famous ancestor. Each week an investigator and a true believer take one family legend, test it against passenger lists, census pages, old newspapers and what DNA can and cannot say, and tell you what really happened. The answer is usually stranger than the legend. Every claim checked using FactUnion's fact-checking process; every source is in the episode notes.
Made by WovenPod. Hosted by Ruth and Danny, performed by synthetic voices. Sources are in every episode's notes.
FactUnion VerifiedEvery episode's facts were checked against their sources. What this means
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Episodes
Newest first-
Descended from Charlemagne? So Is Your Mail Carrier
A 1941 family letter says "We are all descendants of Charlemagne," and the maths of ancestry says it is probably true, just the wrong kind of true.
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Hubbard, James E. and the Night the Records Burned
"His records burned in the fire" ends a lot of family war stories, and the 1973 St. Louis fire was real, but it had limits, and the paperwork it left behind is often less empty than families were told.
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The Clerk Who Wasn't There
Everybody's family says the name got changed at Ellis Island, so we pulled the manifests, a 1913 court case and the archives to find out who actually held the pen.
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