Here’s how history and folk tales converge: When a family member wants to pass along information to descendants, it’s often best preserved as a story. The facts might or might not be enhanced.

The narrative, elaboration or not, is the bottle used to send a message to the generations to come. The bottle makes the story float.

Dawn Jiles-McCall’s 658-page genealogical work, “The Descendants of Captain Edmund Sams of Buncombe County,” includes painstaking research, suppositions and lore, duly noted as such. Facts and oral history are not mutually exclusive.

Jiles-McCall first got her history from a fairy-tale-like situation. Her maternal grandmother, Jessie Leona Merrell Jiles, adopted her as an infant and raised her in her Etowah home, which lacked running water and a telephone, as well as electricity in all but one room.

Once a month, on a church day, Jessie took Dawn to see Jessie’s aunts in Asheville and Leicester. It involved a trip to a family graveyard. And about once a month, Jessie sat down with little Dawn and went through her box of photographs.