Family History

My youngest daughter is taking Folklore this semester, and her assignment this week was to write about a "family story". I did come up with quite a few, but here is the one she used (in my words, and slightly expanded).

John Murray was my great-grandfather. He was born in Lot 65, in Prince Edward Island, Canada (henceforth known as PEI) in 1870. He left there sometime around in the 1890s - a whispered portion of the story says "there was something about a young girl" - and hopped trains to and around the US, eventually marrying Ivy Stoops somewhere in the Midwest, and then making their way to California, where they settled in the Los Angeles area.

John, whom I knew as "Pop Murray", was famous for being a storyteller and a bit of a trickster. This particular story involves his return visit to PEI. A cousin reported that one day, a hobo appeared at her back door, asking to "work for food". This hobo was filthy, dressed in rags, and with several teeth missing. He chopped food for a couple of hours before the cousin recognized him as John. The "missing teeth" had merely been blacked out with tar. I'm sure the cousin was horrified and angry that he had fooled her, but by the time I first heard the story in 1980, all the assembled Murrays in PEI (and there were quite a few of them) thought it was very funny.