in the worst way. So she researched her family genealogy. This was back before the internet, so it involved a lot of sending away, hiring people, etc. It took a long time and quite a bit of money. You also had to trust that they were skilled and ethical, which wasn't always true either.
Nobody knows what she found, but it made her extremely unhappy. She shut the whole thing down and briefly explored whether she could visit the archive which contained the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad...something. They finally convinced her that she would not be allowed to be unattended in a room with primary source material. She was saying things to us like "one minute alone in there with a razor blade could fix this whole thing". I'd still love to know what it was, but she destroyed every shred of the copies she'd been sent, all the way to present day. Never discussed any details in her lifetime. I don't even know which archive.
I've never done the research to figure out WTH it was, but my husband uses the Ancestry website and took a detour into my family tree. Following my father's mother, he traced us all the way back to the original Leffingwells of Connecticut - and of the Revolution. My aunt followed the wrong line - probably her father's. She was as eligible for the DAR as it gets, and she never knew.
Our Civil War history was equally disappointing to her. The family story was that an ancestor had died heroically on Seminary Ridge. Turns out he died less heroically at Seminary Hill, a nearby military hospital which was also connected somehow to a prisoner of war camp. I'm not sure whether he was one of ours, one of theirs, a patient, a medic or a guard. The odds are it was dysentery, which is neither heroic, romantic, nor dignified.
So - sheep romancing? Aggravated witchery? The family stories were always so boring. I'd be glad to find out different. Whatever it is, it's not like I did it.
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