An End to Family Myths?

This past week my husband and I were comparing stories that have been handed down in both of our families. And by “stories” I really mean something along the lines of a family myth. Not that I haven’t casually believed the myths in my family. I just never stopped to really evaluate them one way or the other—until one of the myths came up this past week.

My grandmother, sometime during her mid-thirties, lost a child to an aggressive form of pneumonia. The family story goes that this child, who would have been my aunt if she’d lived, was perfectly fine one day, awakened sick the next morning. By mid-afternoon she was much worse and my frantic grandmother took her to the hospital — only to be told there was nothing they could do. This was somewhere around 1930, so medicine wasn’t what it is today. By that same night her little girl was dead. My grandmother was so shocked by her only daughter’s death at just seven years of age that she refused to leave her bedside, where she held her own little vigil all night long. The doctor, seeing my grandmother was inconsolable, let her stay by her daughter’s side throughout the night. In the morning, so it’s been said throughout my lifetime and before, my grandmother’s hair had turned completely white.

Well, never having known my grandmother with anything but the most wonderful white hair, it never occurred to me to question the story. I just accepted it as fact.

And my husband’s family myth? He was raised in rural Illinois, farm country. The story goes that only his grandfather could use a divining rod successfully; he could find water or natural gas beneath the ground, when no one else could. The rod would point one way for gas, the other for water.

So . . . could either story be true? Can someone’s hair turn white overnight, because of extreme stress or shock? And can someone find water or natural gas underground with nothing but a sturdy stick that’s shaped like a Y?

My husband and I spent a bit of time online researching our family myths. I’ll say up front that my husband was far more skeptical than I was. We both came away with some healthy doubts.

A divining rod is no more reliable than what you’d think: it’s a stick. A plain, ordinary, stick. If someone finds water with something like that, it’s a miracle.

And my grandmother’s hair? I did find one site that said stress can cause a person’s hair to fall out overnight, and if they have a mix of both gray and original color, the gray is strangely resistant to this phenomena of falling out. So if a person loses a considerable amount of their naturally colored hair and only the gray remains, it could be seen as going gray over night. I’m not sure this was the case with my grandmother, giving her relatively young age—I tend to believe the shock did turn her hair to its lovely white at an early age (the story was that she had white hair at a rather young age). The shock of losing her precious daughter might have begun that change. But overnight? Probably not. Maybe it was a matter of weeks, which might have seemed overnight to her and those who knew her.

My point in writing this is that in this day of video recording, can such myths last in families any more? If my family had more pictures of my grandmother during this time in her life, we’d have seen evidence of such a dramatic change.

And if someone had taken a video of my husband’s grandfather divining water with a stick, that would be enough to prove his talent.

So the stories that are handed down in families these days won’t be the oral kind that are touched by love and loyal devotion and even the drama of a moment. They’ll likely have to be backed up by smart phone video if future generations are to believe the stories of this day and age.