How to Turn 'My Dad Knew Him' Into a Provenance Statement

If a famous goth once shuffled through your small-town school, congratulations — you have instant cultural capital and a new family anecdote to taxonomies as evidence.

A Redditor dropped this: “Hopefully this is allowed… I went to the same school as Robert Smith from The Cure,” and the comments did what they always do: corroborate with maximum nostalgia and minimum paperwork. Responses included the thrilling forensic short-form: “Certainly believable,” a proud parent-level affidavit (“my dad told me he went to school with Robert Smith — wooow”), a geographic guess (“St Wilfred’s Crawley?”), and the deepest form of archival proof: a yearbook photo on the mantle (plus a sibling case study — “I went to school with two Tom Greens… the famous ones 9th grade yearbook photo is the same on the mantle”). Someone even offered the punny postmortem: “I guess he Cured the teacher of complaining about his trousers.” That sentence is a masterpiece of rumor consolidation.

Patch notes / inventory list for manufacturing a local legend (three items): 1) a photograph on your fireplace hearth, 2) one teacher who remembers an oddly dressed pupil, and 3) at least one relative who says “wooow.” Combine them and you don’t get proof — you get a perfectly serviceable origin myth. If it’s on the mantle, it happened; if it’s not on the mantle, it’s waiting for someone to move a framed photo and tell the story louder.