[Phoenix]

Family stories are difficult to interpret at the best of times. When it is "an ancestor" in someone else's tree, it is even more challenging.

I'm doing a friend's tree, with a tale of a man hanged on Portsmouth Common.

I have discovered a small scale criminal, moving from his home village in Oxfordshire and joining the Royal Marines, having several children before he married his unfortunate wife, continuing his nefarious activities, but stupidly stealing from his fellow marines.

He was court martialled, severely flogged, and sent to Winchester Jail, where he died a few weeks later of a rupture of an abcess on the liver. It's hard not to think that a particularly bad flogging may well have caused his death.

I can't help feeling that the family may well have embellished a rather sad and sordid story for the sake of the children, embellishing it with each generation. (My "came over with the Potato Famine" story, also Portsmouth was patently wrong as our ancestor James Riley died several years before the famine started!)

Do you think I have found the origin of the story, or should I keep on looking?