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Thoughts about Ancestors
 Wading thru reams of repetitive and
mind-numbing data gives one pause... time to think about the
people we search for... not the names on registers but the
just-plain-folk characters... when a child is born to your
6g grandmother a year before she gets married, you have to
wonder about her worries... her stigma... her hush-hushings
among the family... her pride... and her lust. It is this
that i believe we search for. Sure, we want dates and
verifiable census data, but when we hear tales of how, for
instance, my great grandmother "Polly"
Anne Fuller
unselfishly traveled around the hills of SW Virginia helping
victims during the spinal meningitis epidemic of 1929
(really only making them comfortable before death - and
tempting the very same disease to get her), and then reading
a poem that a relative wrote about it... this is the stuff
of imagination.
Genealogists wade thru the dusty minds and
dustier attics of their relatives in search of clues. We are
like forensic children hoping to find a document to turn
over and over in our hands - somewhere between scientists,
clerks and miners. I am reminded that the Native Americans
teach us to revere our ancestors, to call on them in our
quest for spirit and power. To draw on their experiences as
our own. (And isn't it ironic that many of the 'white
people' in our family lines, including mine, were ashamed of
any Indian blood that we had - instead of in today's world
we're busy declaring ourselves 1/16 Cherokee Indian as a
badge of honor). It is this combined sense of play and
reverence that we approach genealogy.
Acknowledging the Work of Those That Came
Before
The Role of Clerks and
Bean-Counters in Back Offices
We owe a great deal to the clerks of the world.
Not to mention scribes writing ship-lists, census takers,
court stenographers and even insurance claims-adjusters.
Sometimes it is only thru these people, concealed by their
regularity and unknown or even considered necessary evils to
our ancestors, that we find out even the existence of an
additional child or of a move out west.
The Role of Family
Historians and Area Genealogists
A mood of nostalgia follows our heels as we
move laboriously thru the great generations. The wars, the
struggles, the wrestling of our sustenance from the ground
as farmers, are terrible tribulations while they are
happening, but afterwards, a scant generation or so, become
the stuff that's told around campfires and hearths and serve
to remind us that no matter how tough it is for the moment
that, in the words of Carly Simon "These ARE the good ol'
days."
And this nostalgia is what
initially drives the local genealogist and historian of
earlier times. Books lovingly written about the descendants
of so-and-so and the pioneers of an area or a great
migration of ethnic groups thru the land and the uprooting
and sorrows that accompany it are the potatoes to a meal of
census data.
Peppered throughout my
kin, and yours, are people who somehow knew that the
children that followed them would want to know about the
ones who came before, and who have helped define them both
genetically and situationally. I cannot credit any one man
greater in my research in this regard more than Elihu Jasper
Sutherland. His books, Some Descendants of John Counts of
Glade Hollow,
Meet Virginia's
Baby, and
Pioneer Recollections
of Southwest Virginia
and letters and keen interest has preserved, seemingly more
than many other things put together, the facts and flavor of
the people who were my kin and those they knew. Along these
lines are the great unfinished - my great aunt Vivian
Sutherland whose unpublished "Remembering Papa and Mama" is
just as important and even more valuable to me.
The Role of the
Internet
Think globally, act locally. The internet
causes people to exist without time and space. I know
several webpages that haven't been updated for years and yet
they are 'out there' annoying me still in my web-searches.
It is information that is like a stillborn child. The
internet is a strange place.
Maybe the internet is a kind of library that
you skate thru and grab at books and parts of magazines that
seem important. Someday when search-engines are personal and
hobby-bots diligently fetch important data and groom it as
would a faithful dog, then it will be more sane. Then again
we hope not sane-itized, but we will all be hyperLinked! My
family tree will dovetail (and agree more) with yours and
when you click on a link you'll have to decide
whose information you want (instead of
what information). But i digress (as i
usually do)...
Currently the internet is awash with
genealogical data. There are even ancestor sites and
everybody seems to want to put up the most information about
their families and their research. It's good. And confusing.
And probably an awful lot of 'wrongness' out there. This
form of entropy is being combated by the data groomers out
there. These people and their sites and commitments are the
future of the internet if it is to survive its analogy to
television.
There are, however, a great deal of people i
cannot thank because what they do is so far behind the
scenes it's impossible to know. These are the people that
put together sites like the Social Security Death Index
(SSDI) and the multitudes of people whose
time is volunteered (or even poorly paid) for involvement in
the worldwide GenWeb project throughout the United
States, and the
GenServ, even places like the US Geological
Survey USGS - all of which i try to provide links
to because what they do is important even if i weren't
playing 'family tree.' The more obvious people whom i thank
are in my references and show in the links to personal
websites and personal genealogical sites.
The Role of
Photos
Photos are windows of the imagination. The
moment a picture is snapped, that moment becomes memory. A
frozen tic of time as if time could be captured. We forget
that time is not a thing at all but a process - as if it
could be a string of moments, but i digress as i usually
do.
Where i meant to go with this is that a photo
of the past is something different than the moment itself.
90% of the time we are aware that a picture is going to be
taken, and that's even more true with photos of the past
whose economics and slow film speeds mandated the cry "Ok!
Everyone get in close for picture!" People 'posed' and cut
up for the camera and wanted to be preserved. I think it
tells volumes about how they felt about themselves and their
role, their posture in the world. I love examining old
photographs for the mundane, the lazy dog in the background,
the scuff marks on the boot, the forced relaxedness despite
the clenched fist by the side. Photos are as much what got
me started on this journey as the passing away of kin, at
least originally.
And what i mostly want to say about pictures
will be in the form of a stern and heartfelt warning. Go
mark the back of your photos now. No, right now. Turn off
your computer and march right over to the top of the closet
and slide out that musty-smelling shoe-box and grab a
permanent felt-tip pen and start writing. And not just the
photos that are a line of 8 heads at the last family
reunion, but the ones that show life! Because my father
passed away within a month of his father, i inherited not
only a sad legacy but several boxes of black and white
photos of people i cannot connect. In most of them i cannot
tell you a visiting preacher from a great grandfather, or
some neighbor kid from my grandma as a child.
Diane (my cousin who shares all this family
stuff with me - and about whom you will know more and more
indirectly) and i were lamenting this very problem while
going thru a box of (mostly unmarked) pictures of her life.
One relative who sent her pictures wrote something on the
back of everything and we began to look for her pictures to
see what she had to say. On the back of a picture of eight
cows and 2 calves facing the same direction (as cows are
wont to do) she wrote: "Uncle Zebediah's cows looking
hungrily to the left towards the barn just before Zeb was
about to feed them. June 1967" Diane admitted that she
hadn't realized that cows had that much on their minds.
After the laughter i realized that this relative wasn't a
frustrated author but someone who cared about about
reference. Someone who wanted us to know that it was summer
and what that smelled like and that there were things beyond
the picture that were just as important as the picture
itself.
Because you are now busy marking photos on your
kitchen table i'll wait here.... but if i could tell you one
thing as you hum Paul Simon's Kodachrome with your felt-tip
ablaze, i'd ask you to give a moments thought as each
picture flashes in front of you. "Who took the picture?"
It's someone who was there too, you know.
The Role of other
things
I'm sure the role of family traditions, and of
children and teachers, and other things like oral
story-telling fit in here somewhere, but i'm a little tired
of typing. Maybe tomorrow.
Thoughts about Intermarrying
Well, what's the big deal? Well.... it seems
the Sutherland side of my ancestry lived up in the hills and
hollers of Southwest Virginia, in old Russell
County (what is mostly
Dickenson, Wise and Buchanan counties now) and the 'available
spouse base' or 'eligible husband/wife pool' from which to
select a spouse was pretty limited.
The truth is, I am my own 3rd cousin. How is
that possible? Well, depending on which route you follow, my
family goes back to several large families that i am related
to in different ways. For
example, my
GGGGrandfather, Richard "Fighting Dick" Colley had at least
7 children - three of which i can call Great Great
Grandparents. And because generations don't happen in
structured and ordered (time-wise) ways, i have
GGGrandmothers marrying GGUncles. It blurs the idea that
traits tend to 'skip generations'. Traits (such as being
overly verbose - some may suspect) show up when and where
they decide to. Several of my various grandmothers didn't
have to change their maiden names when they got married, so
we're considered a 'loving family' i guess. I personally
don't go to family reunions to cruise for chicks, however.
It's funny. My dear grandmother Maxine, as she grew older
found this intermarrying to be a source of embarrassment for
her and did little things to obfuscate the fact that she
married her 2nd cousin. We found out anyway.
Along those lines, there seems to have been
some degree of concern among my family about whether i, as
the first grandchild of 2nd cousins, was going to turn out
to be some kind of functional idiot or a scatterbrained
genius. Well, double-hmmph. The debate hasn't as yet been
resolved. I find it interesting that i myself have, at
various times thru the years, taken both sides of this
thorny issue.
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SUTHERLAND
