Sometimes, the stories you heard as a child are g>almost right ;-)
Follow me over the doodle-squiggly for case where I should have taken a family story with a larger grain of salt......and how I actually did have an ancestor come through Ellis Island (I'd always said my mother's family was too early ~~ all here by 1800, and Dad's had come through Canada).
The story I'd heard as a child was so detailed... my grandfather, accompanied by his three younger brothers, had immigrated to Canada a few years before WW1, to join his oldest (and newly married sister). My great-grandmother (nee Charlotte Paterson; remember that surname) had just died, and my great-grandfather was not in good health, plus the opportunities in Canada seems more brilliant than those in the slums of Leith (now the port area of Edinburgh, it had long been a separate city....).
In the information I had from my grandmother, there were death dates for her parents in the late 1870s. So imagine my surprise when I found them both alive and well in the 1881 census. Exhibit A in how the information you may have from family may be wrong ;-)
So I kept looking for the death records for Charlotte's parents: William and [Jacobina] Isabella Bain {nee Ralston} Paterson. Looked and looked and looked.... no trace of them in Scotland's usually fairly comprehensive records (at least post-1855, when civil registration became mandatory; decent fines ensured reliable compliance fairly quickly).
About this time in the search, a very elderly distant cousin in Australia wrote to another cousin in Canada that Charlotte's family thought she'd married down (she had a bit, if you go in for that kind of categorization....; her father was solidly lower middle class, while her husband was distinctly working class) and therefore the family was somewhat distant after Charlotte's marriage. The Australian cousin also mentioned in passing that some of Charlotte's family immigrated 'to America' (which was likely the US, but could have also been Canada, given the people involved and the time for the story to evolve since the events happened). But with a name like Paterson ~~ and not knowing exactly who or where ~~ I wasn't having much luck finding them....
My father also told me stories of how, when he was very young in Buffalo NY, the family would sometimes visit some family out in Perry, NY (with whom my grandfather had stayed a year or two just before WW1). But he couldn't remember the cousins' names.....the Depression and WW2 had put an end to the visits before Dad was old enough to remember the names of adults he saw once or twice a year.... So when the 1930 census came out, I searched for Perry residents born in Scotland, and actually found a couple of Charlotte's sisters..... but the trail went cold there :-(
Around the same time, I was searching the Ellis Island database for some research I was doing for a friend. Knowing that my grandfather had been in the Canadian forces in WW1, I typed his name in, hoping to find him on the return trip, or one of the couple of trips he'd made in the early 1920s.
Amazingly, I found him my grandfather arriving alone in 1910... destination Cleveland, to stay with an aunt. Her name led me to other relatives, and finally to my great-grandparents' graves near Perry, as they died there in 1906 (him) and 1913 (her). No wonder I didn't find a death record for either of them in Scotland.... My father and his sisters had no memory of anyone every mentioning that their grandparents had immigrated (in 1882, based I records I've since found, a year after Charlotte, who stayed in Scotland, married) ~~ only cousins. But I'm guessing that it was as much physical distance as social snobbery that led to the Australian cousin saying the family was distant after Charlotte's marriage ;-)
Finally, a few pictures from a recent trip to Ellis Island. (The best ones seem to have been lost in a hard disk crash; if I ever find them, they will feature in a future diary.....)
What family stories have you had turn out to be not quite true