I assume it is your family doing this "joking"? I would not be talking about my difficulties with those who could not help me. Just because someone else was "there" does not mean they are reliable blank-filler-inners, even if they were the only one there; I'd rather work with just myself and my own sleuthing than have a person known to try to emotionally hurt me be relied on for good information?

My aunt, my father's sister, and I corresponded about my early childhood; she was across country and we wrote letters back and forth and, later, one of my cousins got into it too as he had his own questions about his own parents that she could help us with. I did not ask my father or older brother questions, I did not want my stepmother to know what I was doing and I was afraid of hurting my father in some way or causing difficulties for myself, he was too "close" to the issues I had. My brother, nine years older than I, has blocked out memories.

No one else's memories of what happened are going to be unbiased! Memories are very individual, like fingerprints; in what is remembered and how it is remembered and how the story of the memory is told. It is good to know the person and their biases before talking with them; I know my aunt hated her mother, my grandmother, and I loved my grandmother so I had to filter some of the "information" I was given through my own ideas of what was what.

I think the true information we can feel "in our bones" and the other stuff, is just stuff. A family member making a joke out of my memory problems would not be someone I would feel kindly about, that would make me angry rather than hurt me. I would make sure they were not in a position to make such comments to me again; would not go to family reunions where such a thing was likely to come up unless I had some family members around who would find it in as poor taste as I did and help squelch the idiot.