Julia of all Trades Master of None: My Grandad was a storyteller.

My grandfather liked to tell me stories. He didn't read them, he created them. If I asked him a question the answer would be whatever he thought was most interesting, rather than the truth. Once I asked him why the knitted teddy bear was called Brian. He sat back in his chair, popped a toffee in his mouth and said, "Well, there was this little boy called Brian. He was a beautiful boy, with cute round rosy cheeks and he lived here with us until one day a witch stole his soul away and turned him into this bear, which stayed with us." My grandmother walked into the room, folded her arms and rested them on top of her enormous bosom (she is the only woman I have ever known who could balance a cup of tea on her breasts) and said, "Don't listen to him, love, he's messing with you. It was your cousin Brian's bear. You know, Brian in New Zealand?"

When I was in the third year of Junior school I had a teacher that loved a map and family history. We all had to go and ask our grandparents where they were born and plot it on the map. My grandad tried to tell me that he was from Scotland. "It's where the red hair comes from," he said. He wasn't. He was a Londoner. Then he told me that our family name used to be McRae and was anglicised when we moved from Scotland but had been too stupid to choose a name that was already around, which is why everyone in the phone book with my surname was related to me.

Later on, a senior school project was to make a family tree. This was harder for me than for most, with 22 cousins. Undeterred, I went to Grandad. He told me that his grandmother was called Emma McRae. When my sister had a similar project as part of a Social Work degree Grandad told her that his grandmother was from a wealthy Scottish family, the McRaes who disowned her when she married his poor grandfather.

When we at my parent's the other weekend we took a nostalgic trip through some old photos and came across the family tree. My daughter is a bit of a whiz with tracing family history on the internet, so we traced it back as far as we could online. Unsurprisingly, my Grandad's grandmother wasn't called McRae after all and she wasn't from a wealthy family. Then, a generation further back we became quite excited when we found Esther McRae, but her parents weren't Scottish, or wealthy.

We traced the family line back to the beginning of the 1800s to Suffolk. Still no Scottish connection! On the 1851 census we found my great, great, great (there might be one more great - I've lost count) grandfather living with his wife and children. The wife was born in 1822 and my one less great grandfather was born in 1846. He had three brothers born in 1846, 1842 and 1834. "Ewww! She was 14!" We started to make up stories. Grandad had nothing on us. Then noticed a 23 year old daughter and her husband. "No, that's just not possible. A baby at six? Never!" He had probably been married twice before but that was a little boring. We found a record of him marrying this wife in 1841 but also found a marriage in 1832 to a different woman. "Maybe he was a bigamist?" I said.
"She probably died," replied my journalist daughter; for some reason she's attached to the truth. "There is a story here though," she said.

My daughter went back to University and I resisted the temptation to tell the story of Charles, Sarah and Mary and their sordid three way love affair, that broke Sarah's heart. I imagined that if I visited the graveyard of the town churches I would stumble upon the grave, beautifully marked and preserved, with the answers to the story engraved for posterity. Obviously, I found moss covered gravestones with illegible writing and areas of unmarked graves in both town churches. I will probably, instead, have to visit the registry office and spend a day in a dusty basement looking at a computer screen to get anywhere near the true story.

I think Grandad may have had the right idea, though. Why go to all this trouble when you can make up a much more interesting story? I have already decided that of the two towns I visited my relatives almost certainly hailed from the one with the interesting history, pretty cottages and wonderful sign rather than the large soulless town nearby and no piece of paper or entry on a computer is going to change my mind on that.