The New Yorker:

Elizabeth Hoover, who has taught at Brown and Berkeley, insists that she made an honest mistake. Her critics say that she has been lying for more than a decade.

By Jay Caspian Kang

In 1928, a forty-one-year-old woman named Adeline Ovitt, née Rivers, drowned in the Schroon River, in upstate New York. The circumstances of her death are largely unknown, but she left behind a husband and five children, including a ten-year-old son named LeRoy, who later had six children of his own, including a daughter named Anita. Anita eventually settled down with Robert Hoover, a pipe fitter for General Electric, in the town of Knox, about forty minutes west of Albany. In 1978, Anita and Robert had their first child together, a daughter named Elizabeth. Two more daughters would follow.

Elizabeth Hoover, who is now forty-five years old, describes her childhood as “broke”—her father worked odd construction jobs and was periodically unemployed—but idyllic. “I spent most of my time running around outside,” she told me recently. “My dad said I could head anywhere as long as I took a dog, a walking stick, and a knife.” Much of her youth was spent harvesting vegetables, butchering meat, and chopping wood for the winter.

Go to link