Many friends and acquaintances, knowing of my avid interest in family history, often ask me questions pertaining to the subject. The one question most difficult for me to answer is: “What useful purpose is served by all this digging into the past?” I spend hour upon endless hour in the basements of centuries old buildings digging through endless stacks of ancient papers. I drive hundreds of miles to far off libraries to become buried in huge piles of books searching for obscure facts and details. I plan week-long vacations around my ancestors' history just to get a simple glimpse of a green valley or a little mountain stream where my people once lived. And all to what useful end? The answer is at once very simple and very complicated: In searching out the ancestors of my past, I hope to know and understand them, and by knowing them I hope to know and understand myself better.
If I were forced to choose only one ancestor to really know, there is no doubt I would choose the Revolutionary Charles Powell. When I went looking for the real Charles Powell, I found a risk-taker who freely chose to oppose one of the most powerful nations of his time in open rebellion in the faint hope of gaining more freedom. Then, when faced with the hard choice of obeying his new government or protecting his family, he chose his family. Even after making these choices, at the advanced age (for that time) of fifty he chose to strike out for a new life in the wilderness of the Kentucky frontier. And on that frontier, when he made some bad choices and his wife of forty years left him accusing him of unjust and ill treatment, he rejected his first instinct to defend his name against the charges, choosing instead to try to heal the wounds he had inflicted on her by accepting his responsibility to provide for her welfare even in the face of her attacks on his character. In Charles Powell's life I found a man who faced life's many challenges with resolute faith in his own conscience, always falling back on his own steadfast ideals of right and wrong even when they did not agree with those of his government or his friends.
In looking at the life of Sarah, Charles' wife, I found a woman who, at a time when all women were expected to be submissive and accept whatever hand life dealt them, chose to stand up and fight back. When her husband, in a drunken rage, beat her and subjected her to untold indignities, she chose to leave him. When he refused her any share in the assets they had acquired in their life together, she chose to fight him in the courts. In an age when women were taught to simply accept whatever fate life, God, and their husbands chose for them, Sarah Gholson Powell chose instead to stand and fight. And, by damned, she won! If that isn't a lesson for all battered women of our day.
And then we have a women of Palatine German descent, Leah Goldman Powell orphaned by age five, left to depend on the charity of a benevolent brother-in-law for all the necessities of life. When left a young widow with twelve children under the age of 21, she went against the accepted practice of the day that said her children must be bound out to the neighbors for subsistence. Instead, she fought against all odds to keep the family together, possibly even making enemies of her older children with her iron-fisted rule. She vowed her off-spring would not depend on the charity of others as she had to do in her youth. She gave up her own life before seeing the out-come of this fight, but only days before her death her only thought was for her young children. She said,“I will not go until my son Jacob comes to care for the babies.” What lesson could Leah not teach us about standing steadfast against all odds, knowing that somehow God will provide the answer.
And with Leah was her son Henry. In a dusty courthouse basement I found the words of Henry Powell, recorded hundreds of miles from and almost a hundred years before the birth of my father. From those yellowed pages Henry's words jumped out, “ My brothers and I will not become paymaster to Charles Hart.” But, it was not the voice of Henry Powell that I heard. I heard the voice of my father uttering these same ideas hundreds of miles and a hundred years away. Just as his ancestors had made hard choices, Henry made the difficult choice of taking his young wife and small children into the wilderness in search of a new life. In Henry's life we see again and again a man who marched to a different drummer using the sound of his own conscience as a guide, just as his grandfather did years before him. But, I see Henry watching from the shadows as my father marched to his own drummer, and far off in the distance, I hear Henry say, “Amen!”
Even some of my most obscure ancestors help me know myself. Matilda Hilton was just a child-bride of thirteen when she married Henry Powell, ten years her senior. She followed him into the wilderness, bore him nine children on the frontier of America, and possibly gave up her own life in giving birth to her ninth child. With Matilda the know facts about her life are few, but oddly it is with her that I identify most readily, perhaps because my ideas about her are largely the product of my own imagination. I see her running barefoot over the hills and valleys of Kentucky with her mother's voice off in the distance calling,“Matilda, Matilda,” just as my own mother called my name as I ran barefoot over the hills and valleys of the Ozarks. Maybe the lesson Matilda teaches me is that the more things change the more they remain the same. Regardless of their time and place on earth, people are just people, and Matilda and I are forever connected.
Then there is John Powell who left his young family and went off to fight in a war for a cause that I can not agree with. Charles Powell, his great-grandfather, fought for freedom, and then John and Henry fought for slavery, against freedom, or so it seemed. But, when digging deeper, I found that when the Southern States started succeeding Abraham Lincoln ordered the sons of Missouri to take up there arms and fight against the South to force these states back into the Union. John and Henry said we will decide for ourselves who we will take up arms against, and then they turned their guns on Mr. Lincoln's troops. I do not agree with their cause, but I can not help but admire their spirit. When Henry decided he was too old for war, John fought on, to the death. His death seems such a waste of a young life. But, he left six children on earth who grew up, married and had many children of their own. Today, the descendants of John Powell number in the thousands. Surely, somewhere, sometime, someone of these thousands has made a significant mark on the world somewhere, sometime. There are several John Powells alive today that owe their very name to this former John Powell. His death may have been for naught, but through his children's children's children his life counted.
By digging deeper and deeper into the past, it is my most ardent hope that by revealing the lives and times of our ancestors I may make it possible for my children and grandchildren and all our people to know and learn from their forefathers. It is my hope that with my stories the hand of Charles Powell may reach down through eight generations and touch my grandson that he may know the value of following his own conscience and not blindly follow his friends or his government. It is my hope the hand of Sarah Gholson Powell will reach down and touch our granddaughters that they may know the value of standing and fighting for their rights. It is my hope the hand of Leah Goldman Powell will reach out and touch our children and grandchildren that they may have faith and hope in God. It is my hope the hand of Henry Powell will reach out and touch the children that they may learn the value of marching to their own drummer. And It is my hope the hand of John Powell will reach out and touch us all that we may know we do not need to be famous celebrities to make a mark on the world. Most of all, it is my hope our children and grandchildren may see the many mixtures that we are all made of and know the value of a person does not lie with complexion, nor religion, nor race, nor nationality, nor with any manner of outward appearance but that the real value of a person is measured by what lies within. It is my hope to reach out and touch the lives of my ancestors and learn the lessons they lived and died to learn.