At the beginning of this project I spent three days glued to the computer. It was after I'd started interviewing Mama. I was transcribing the tapes when I decided to search engine some of the names in the stories.
It was like being dropped into a thick mountain side area and being totally lost!
I'd be jotting down notes of possible connections and following maybes and then stop dead in my tracks and think...how am I going to get to know about my family like this?
Which brought up another question: Why don't we already know everything about our family?
Distance, is one reason why there is more unknowing about our family than there is knowing. On both "sides" of my family tree (my maternal and paternal) there "was always" considerable distance between us. Part of that ties in with the story of many Americans advancing through time...although there are settlements, there has also been an awful lot of scattering.
I re-entered the few place names I'd "got" and stared at the maps trying to "place" the names that Mama remembered IN the locations I'd just heard about. This began a journey through time and space. This journey was more virtual than physical at this point in the research. And we set up the website to reflect the enormity of space to cover. Whereas a distance of some hundred miles in physical terms could be covered with one click of the mouse, we still had lots of traveling to do to gather all the information about our family!
We found ourselves running around between records and also between keepers of records in the different places. Some were official places of records-keeping and some were like stations in the terrain of genealogical research--men and women devoted to sustaining ancestry and history planted firmly in the landscape of archives and the world going digital.
As a literary journalist I am no stranger to traveling to witness history unfolding and to gather information from different sources, but I am not in a financial position to fund this project so I've had to rally and collect as much "free" information as possible and compare tidbits to tidbits, fitting each piece into the bigger puzzle of Mama's quilt.
Although I have traveled fairly extensively throughout the United States and "lived" in more than a couple dozen places along the way, I wasn't near any of the old root sources when I knew of any family history so I missed out on the chance to do in-person research before now. When I was in graduate school in Vermont I had the opportunity to take a seminar in which we began to think about mapping our families. Just recording the places we've lived compared to the places where our ancestors lived proved, in general, an acceleration in the pace of moving around. Of course, these were artists and writers in this seminar and most of us found ourselves even more mobile than our distant relatives were. My own map showed me with very active feet due to my vocation of journalism and the choice to live in many places rather than sit on the porch at the homestead! My parents had lived in far fewer places, "And they have lived in more places than their parents is the general rule when we do these kinds of maps," a teacher explained. It was my first introduction to applying trends to historical research.
Our movement, both physically and in spirit, ties many American families into larger trends in our country.
Distance...is what I feel when I look at place on the maps on the computer.
The distance in physical space compacts the not knowing about things for sure. It's more difficult to weigh facts against hearsay and it can be impossible to break through walls in research without connecting with cousins and other relations who've preserved the ancestral treasure chests.
The largest patch of green on the map near Moundsville is the Marshall County Fairgrounds.
I had been told that Moundsville was called that because of the waste piles of coal.
I cruise into a Moundsville information site via the computer and find out that the name claims to have origins older than that...the area is home to the Adena Indian burial grounds...the mounds like resting giants...the mounds like mounds of other civilizations...the mounds like...
Something all the people talk about when they talk about this place.
The mounds like beacons on this journey of trying to understand where we came from...And trying to "write" this story in the 21st century.
In the beginning of this project I had no small amount of challenge in finding the right voice to convey all this information. There was the little kid me, shocked and awed to discover the tiniest tidbots of real in our story, and, struggling to carve out some podium from which to share the stage with all these other historians who were doing this before me.
There was the almost forty-something year old woman grasping the emotional life of the characters in the story. In this I did a lot of crying because, of course, dipping into legend always proves that the characters were just as human as their contemporaries.
There was the forager me. Tip-toeing and stumbling in the dark and rushing backwards and forwards eager to tell Mama what I was finding. Sometimes I'd get too excited and make mistakes. Mistakes weren't difficult to make because it takes a great deal of patience and perseverance to GO SLOW and record pockets of information carefully and then verify all the data by comparison and to official records. Mistakes can also come about because sometimes there is quite a difference between the family stories and real life.
I had scant information to work with in the beginning of this project. Well, I have a ton of things learned about my country, and I had scraps from family stories but I have never had many factual details about my family and my roots.
It seems odd that at this time in my life when I'm personally wondering how to move forward, I find myself trying to find out where we've been. This is, I think, part middle age landing and part of a global movement that seems to suggest that if enough of us get back in touch with the reality of where we've come from, we can work on where we're going in the present and for the sake of the future.
Staring at the virtual maps--zooming in and out--making lists of the place names as if they might whisper to me what I am looking for, I determine that although I don't, as yet, know exactly where my people came from, by all accounts we seem to have come from that part of West Virginia where another State--Pennsylvania--makes a box imprint on the map. I half wonder if it looks like that in reality. I know it doesn't because over the years I have driven all through America...searching for something, like the something that might be inside of a box and I can't see it from over here. Have to go in and learn.
A lot of boundaries in America are more abstract than they are concrete like state lines crossed on highways. As a writer of this family history I am having to get good about detecting boundaries between people too. No small amount of professionalism is required to talk to people about formally private matters!
Days pass and I get an email back from reaching out to a distant relative. The little bit of information jumps out as if from the trunk...a word, a name...and I find that this helps me get more precise about something.
My Great Grandma Pearl grew up in a place called Miracle Run.
I "googled it" and find...
There's a Blue Goose Road.
I flick between screens on the computer and see which roads have been there for a long time, maybe long enough to have been the same roads my ancestors traveled, and, reading local histories.
As a lifelong scholar I know that it's been the trial of the millennium to get all the hardcopy materials of the world loaded into the Internet and I get excited because though there isn't a ton of information on the computer there is most likely tangible evidence and leads out there and I just need to find them.
Blue Goose, Miracle Run Road...
And I found a bunch of early American history about the area--online! The Quilt for Mama project was suddenly taking on dimensions. I needed to figure out how best to log and relate all this research, credit the work that wasn't mine, and PRESENT it all on the Quilt blogsite.
Doing a cluster of websites with a blogsite as headquarters was my offering to my mother, Sherry Candy Lane, who had at my age made an all out effort to travel and meet whatever family we knew of. And it was my chance to work up enough material to write a book similar in genre to John O'Brien's AT HOME IN THE HEART OF APPALACHIA. I found a copy at my local library ongoing booksale and was ecstatic because I'd been so busy working on an interdisciplinary arts degree I'd gotten away from my own studies of literary journalism. O'Brien's book was a beacon in the landscape of literary journalism and reminded me that genealogy and historical nonfiction had been pooling in a queue of my studies. Back in the 1990s we'd hit a collective questioning of distinctions between genres of writing, rather than get stuck in the quagmire I marched out of strictly academic argument space and went to work WRITING literary journalism. One of my first projects was about five contemporary women who were doing various kinds of art. Artists being attached to real life despite the sometimes reputation for flying free in artdoing, come with their own family stories, so that project (the RECKONING project) wasn't all that different from other contemporary works which include history in their purview.
Reading O'Brien was like a homecoming for me as a writer. But I didn't believe that this kind of work was actual "literary journalism" until I read Joan Didion's WHERE I WAS FROM. Since I had studied Joan's work and could see how WHERE I WAS FROM fit into a whole body of work which was very often literary journalism, I felt that I wouldn't trading my title of literary journalist for some other role as a writer. This may sound silly, but as a serious student of writing and specifically of nonfiction writing and journalism, I can report that distinctions between types of writing similar to distinctions between fact and non-fact are a big damn deal in a world where narrative and action are so closely intertwined. Just this much back into considering a new project had me ALSO needing to reckon with my graduate studies. To do some version of all that learning on the Internet, for free, or to hold out until I could get a teaching position somewhere bubbled to the top of the tar pit.
Distractedly I kept reading whatever I could find online during the evenings after some long days of transcribing audio tapes and setting up an archive of Lane Family History. And brainstorming on best etiquette in producing the blogsite.
Stuck in West Virginia, trying to get my mind around the vast task of learning for myself how America developed as a place alongside all our people living in America...
At the time a man named Blacksville after his family name--Black and made a "town" out of a settlement (which sprouted out of land plots and a tangled history of pre-Revolutionary land claiming and forging)...there were land owners and "squattors."
At my desk I wrestled with the either/or scenarios. And I thought long and hard about placing my ancestors in the picture either way. Whether they were the ones on the deeds or the "squattors"...they FIT!
They were there.
Due South of what is called Brave, Pennsylvania--my people journeyed through Miracle Run.
To learn a bit more about this drawing and Scottish pearls, look for the book THE HARVEST OF THE SEA posted on ElectricScotland.com
Don't forget to come back to the Quilt sometime and learn more about OUR Pearl.
Don't forget to come back to the Quilt sometime and learn more about OUR Pearl.
I found a picture of little Mama around the time she went to visit Mammy and Pappy Fox.
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| Sherry Lynn Candy, 1954 |
She remembers going to the "big house" and seeing Mammy, Ida Mae (Delaney) Fox without any shoes on just like in the stories.
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| The old homestead in Miracle Run, West Virginia. The home of Elias and Ida Mae Fox. |
Sherry was very insistent about not getting adopted because she had a father and someday he would come back to West Branch. And when Sherry moved in with her grandparents, Jesse and Pearl Bohlinger, Grover would visit her there. We've set up a few websites to help us explain the different chapters of this story and you can click on the photograph below to get to the farm!
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| Sherry Candy in between her father Grover Candy and her grandfather Jesse Bohlinger. West Branch, Michigan. |
