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| The fields where the children played...looking back toward the cemetery hill. |
When my husband first became interested in knowing his ancestry, I was perfectly willing to let this be his hobby. History was a subject he liked and I hated. His memory was great, so memorizing dates and details came easy to him. I thought that the children would appreciate knowing a little about thier family, so why not give him all the space he needed to take this trek. The time came, however that he wanted to know something about my ancestors to fill in his tree, so he found something he wanted me to see. It was a list of cemeteries in the mountains where my mother's people were from. He was interested in the ones with her father's name, but I was interested in the ones with her mother's maiden name. I knew that this was where we would find people I knew. When we read the names on one of them, I recognized them right away. I will never forget what he said. "You can't possibly know if that is your family by just reading their names." Well, I may have only been a child when I was there, but I knew these people with no doubts. When we read the directions, I told him that was how to get to where they all had lived. Now most of his ancestors have been found in old church graveyards. None, that I know of, were buried in their own backyards. So this notion of mine that the directions to the graveyard were also the directions to the old home place, as mother used to call it, was beyond his vision. But not mine. I could see it in my mind as if it were yesterday. I could smell the earth, and taste my aunts' home made butter and jelly, just as if it were really in front of me. I saw glints of faces, and imagined myself sitting in the chairs at the long kitchen table. I could hear the laughter of the children playing in the pastures as they used the excuse of going to this very cemetery as a chance to escape the adults and play pranks on the newby cousins. I knew this place! I knew these people. Their ancestors had lived there before them. They came to the mountains, and the mountains were in their blood, and in mine.
Some of what I knew about these mountains was from the stories my mother told me. She told them with such love. How she walked out to the spring and the snakes lay long and stretched out along the bank. And everytime I think of that story, I think of how the men said they had to clear the snakes from Aunt Virgie's house if she had been away for a week or two, so she could spend the night down there. I remembered the barns with tobacco hanging, and the steep hill that went up behind the house. I had never been up to the cemetery, or out to the spring mother spoke of. I didn't go when the other kids went out into the pastures. But I had always wanted to. So a desire to go sprang up in my heart, and that would be the beginning of my love of finding family history. History! My least favorite subject...how could I be researching History? But my greatest delight was that, when I discovered something about my ancestral history, I found out so many of them were the pioneers I had read about in books. Not the ones with famous names necessarily...even though my grandson is the 9th great nephew of Daniel Boone's brother Israel by marriage - my grandson wanted to know exactly how he was related, LOL. No, the "pioneers who fought in the revolutionary war, and sometimes fought the Indians to keep the land they were awarded, some of whom were the first white men who settled an area or built a house, or forged westward to see what was on the other side of that mountain." I can put names to them. And I was extremely surprised that I could. But my ancestors, got to the mountains of Appalachia and fell in love. From Virginia and West Virginia to North Carolina, North Georgia and Tennessee, they settled and stayed. And they fought to defend their right to stay after the Revolution, through the Civil War and until now. I know my mother's heart was there when she died. She even thought that her home was there...Of all the things she forgot, she never forgot the house her daddy built in the valley between two hills in Yancey County, NC. The posts henceforth on this blog will seek to share the history, one story a time, one ancestor's life experience at a time, from what I already know and what I am able to uncover as I find it. It will take the rest of my life to get even some of it written, but at least I am beginning to try.
In loving memory of my Mom, Virginia Maude Roland Fuller McCorkle.
