talking roots » genealogy

The Stuff They were Made Of

netexas — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:31:35 +0000

As I sit here about mid-morning on February 12, 2010, pounding away on my unconnected netbook and, thus, on what is eerily like my last contact with the 21st Century, I let my mind wander back to the lives of my ancestors who lived out their time here in the 19th and earlier centuries without electricity and the electronic devices I have come to depend on for so much in my life.

I am reduced to such thoughts due to the power outage growing out of the seven-inch accumulation of snowfall. Power has been out for and hour and half, and I’m beginning to grow a bit antsy.

I can’t turn on a light switch and get instant light on whatever I am doing. I can’t check my phone machine for missed messages (although a battery backup from the cable company keeps the phone line working at present.) I can’t get cable service due to the need for electricity to power my cable boxes, but that’s not very big considering I need the same electricity to run my television sets anyway. The downside is that my internet service provider is also my cable provider. I am writing this in hopes it will be found by any survivors, and it will be shared with the world.

Toilets are working, and I have running water. That’s very good. On the other hand the refrigerator is now racing against the clock to spoil all the food inside. For our safety, we don’t have natural gas, and they (the anonymous they) try to discourage tanks of liquid gas on the properties here, so no electricity means no heat. Yes, we have a fire place, but it is only a matter of time before we will be breaking up furniture to get some dry wood to burn.

It took me six tries to get my car UP and out of my driveway earlier this morning (with only minimal damage to the car and a nearby tree), so I broke association rules and left it parked on the side of the road. Because of that I can get out and drive over the activity center (about four miles away) for a hot lunch and to use their wireless internet connection. The bad news is that the wife keeps saying she’s not going — something about eating soup and roasting hot dogs at the fireplace.

My ancestors lived in log cabins, no electricity and with just a fireplace for warmth. If they had time to write out something like this, it was most likely with pencil and paper, and they were most likely thankful for having the things I am moaning about having to live with.

Sometimes I wonder about how they made that long trip from eastern Tennessee to eastern Texas before cars, trains, buses, and airlines when I sometimes find myself dreading the 30 mile trip into Tyler in an air-conditioned car.

If I had been the ancestor, I wonder if all the family today might still be living somewhere on the road well short of Texas and nearer Tennessee.

Posted here AFTER the electricity came back on (for the third time, but at least it stayed on this time).

Posted also at http://woodtxgene.com/

One of my favorite resources

netexas — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:54:59 +0000

Since all of my family lines come through southern states — North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi — one of the most valuable background resources I have found for understanding the lives of my 19th Century ancestors is The Dixie Frontier – A Social History of the Southern Frontier from the First Transmontane Beginnings to the Civil War, by Everett Dick, research professor of American History, Union College, Lincoln, Nebraska. (Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). On page 221 of the book, we learn that intermittent fever was another name for malaria. Although girls married young on the frontier (average age 15), the “young maiden” could not “begin to compete with the widow” as a prospective bride (page 135). While a rail splitter did indeed split rails, it was often called mauling rails (p. 313). The book is well documented and offers original sources which can be used for further research.

No ancestor left unremembered

netexas — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:52:09 +0000

No ancestor left behind! That’s it after 32 years of researching.

I started my trek in genealogy in the late 1970s (my earliest correspondence files dated 1977) after receiving one of those “fill-in-your-family-tree” books for Christmas. I was like most starters just facing an empty 5-generation chart with little more data than my generation and that of my parents. Filling the blanks was the goal that motivated me at first with who and when. Over the years, my goals changed as I got deeper in some areas of research and broadened as I found interesting side paths to wander down.

It finally hit me this morning as I was driving and listening to NPR — No ancestor left unremembered. That’s what drives me three decades later. And I mean it for all my ancestors and all ancestors of everyone interested in genealogy and even those who could care less.

My religion teaches me that immortality has to do with the soul, and I get that. But I think how sad it is that people live out their lives and, one day, they are lost not only to memory but to history itself.

My limited reading in the development of family trees and genealogy leads me to believe that it is only the royal, rich, and famous who history remembers. Yet, don’t all our ancestors who laughed and cried, who passed days and nights of joy and pain, whose blood line and DNA testifies to the fact that they were here — don’t they deserve to be remembered? The common folk worked the fields, marched in the armies, raised the crops, and paid the taxes which allowed the rich and famous to be that and deserve their place in the sun. It is in remembrance and documentation that we save them for now and the future.

I don’t know where I will fit in the far distant future. I doubt that rich, powerful, or famous will ever be used to describe me; however, that doesn’t matter. My time is now with the resources and the stories which could disappear in a few generations. It is my place to provide knowledge of that which has gone before me so that the greater story might be known or written by future generations. Perhaps as we work and preserve names and memories today we set the stage for tomorrow’s more universal enlightenment of the value of all lives which otherwise might disappear into the mists of the past.