Several people have pointed out to me over the last few months that genealogy seems to be really important to me; Kahleida has said it in this journal’s replies, and other friends have said it to me in person.
It seems that even meeting new people, I drift towards genealogy eventually. I always tell something about my family. It seems I’m always telling stories of my mom’s family (the Appalachian side) specifically.
The weird thing is, I loathe that family.
But therein lies the story.
As mentioned in my last entry, in childhood I spent nearly every holiday with my mother, my eight aunts and uncles, their spouses and children over at Gramma and Grampa’s house in Detroit. That is the Appalachian side of the family.
Southerners are typically proud people. They are proud of their large families and their ancestral homesteads. From about the age of 11, I was given an oral history of our family. I began writing it down by age 14, and I’m still writing it today. We have family dating back to 1730 in the Virginias, with as yet unconfirmed reports of Scottish origin.
And now, the story:
After roughly 45 years of living in Detroit, Gramma and Grampa decided in 1987 to move back home to Kentucky. The grandchildren were heartbroken and wailed because we’d miss Gramma and Grampa. The adults however… something was wrong. Some of us older kids could see it (I was 15 years old at the time), but we could not understand it.
Two years later, Grampa died. I was 17 years old by then, and so shell-shocked by the news of Grampa’s death, combined with the zombification of being a freshman in college, also combined with the fact that I was working nearly full time, that I shut down emotionally. I refused to go to Kentucky to see Grampa laid to rest. I just couldn’t accept that he was gone. I’d just seen him in June of that year. I didn’t want to see a corpse. So I didn’t go, so everything must be all right. Right?
What I was about to find out was that everything was NOT all right. And I was about to learn what it was that had been curiously WRONG with all the adults in the family.
Mom decided I was now adult enough to be let in on what our family was really like.
The nine sisters and brothers had been fighting since Gramma and Grampa moved to Kentucky - fighting over who would get what when their parents died. They knew their parents were moving back home to die, and a few wanted to start planning out their inheritances from the word go. The rest of the siblings however were horrified at such talk while their parents were still alive. My mother was in this second camp.
So for two years as I approached the last of my teen years, still as naive as a child, I had no idea that my family could have ever been trying for a “Hatfields and McCoys” type reputation.
When Grampa died in September 1989 (just months after my high school graduation), the family got downright nasty with each other. They argued over who would take care of Gramma, now. She insisted she was just fine on the family farm in Kentucky, despite never having learned how to drive. She had her neighbors just down the road to check in on her, she said. None of her kids would listen. SOMEONE had to take care of her, they argued.
Within a year and a half, with Gramma’s health now waning (mostly due to isolation and missing her husband and kids), the debate once again rose. This time, people talked retirement homes! Gramma would have no part of that. But none of her kids were willing to take her in to live with them. Most of her kids had on average four kids of their own, and Gramma didn’t want the noise, bugger the fact that she basically wasn’t invited, anyway. My mom offered to take her in, but Gramma refused. By this time, I’d moved out of the house. But Gramma still cited the fact that my mom was too poor to take care of another person, which was true.
Finally, Gramma relented to her oldest daughter M on condition that Gramma move to Florida where the daughter lived. The eldest of nine, M’s children were full grown and out of the house. Well, mostly out of the house. Except for D, whom I’ve mentioned in this journal before.
The moment that Gramma vacated the Kentucky farmhouse, the war was on. I was finally clued in to the details of the argument that had been raging for years: to ensure escape from poverty for the whole family, why not strip mine the property? This idea was put forth by the eldest of Gramma’s kids, who happened to be an accomplished car and house salesman. He’d buy a shitty car or house, fix it up cosmetically, and sell it for much more than it was worth. Hell, I think he’s still doing that today. He wears gold chains and rings and always has a toothpick sticking out the side of his mouth. He’s the very image and stereotype of the slimy con man.
Several of his brothers and sisters liked his idea, and that’s what began tearing the family apart even before Grampa had died.
Now with Gramma out of the farmhouse, the war was on.
While everyone was screaming at each other, Uncle B, the second eldest boy, snuck down to Kentucky and holed up in the farmhouse with his wife, her kids, and several guns.
Over the years, there’s been several gun waving showdowns at that farmhouse between the two eldest boys, but never any violence. Death threats? Oh yeah, still to this day. But no all out violence.
Gramma lived with her daughter M for about 12 years while her son E tried relentlessly to have her sign over power of attorney to him so he could strip mine the land “for the family”. Gramma heard about how E would make trips down to Kentucky to harrass and threaten her other son B, who was by now diagnosed as dying with Emphysema.
Then another bomb dropped. The family found out that M’s son D had moved in with M and Gramma. Everyone in the family knows that D is a Hepatitis C patient. The family went berzerker again, and several siblings united against M.
When Gramma died of CHF in 2003, some in the family began rumour that perhaps M had murdered her, AND the warpath for the Kentucky farmhouse was rekindled.
That year, I joined my mother and her siblings, as well as a handful of cousins, in the trek to Kentucky to bury Gramma.
On the day of the funeral, my mom and two of her siblings secretly arranged for B to show up at the funeral home to pay his respects before the rest of the family showed up. Meanwhile, my brother and I had taken it upon ourselves to try to coax B from the farmhouse and go with us to the funeral home. We were sad not to find him at the farmhouse - only to learn later he was at the funeral home.
After the funeral in the church, the family drove in procession out to the holler, and we watched as Gramma’s sons laid the casket into the fresh grave on the neighbor’s property up on a hill from their farmhouse (which is officially registered as a family cemetery and holds several of our family as well).
Once finished with that, several of Gramma’s kids decided to go to our farmhouse just down the road and pound on the door til B came out.
My mom and a couple other siblings protested this, and told the rest to leave their brother alone. My brother and I talked about going and standing between our uncles and aunts to prevent violence against Uncle B, but our mom pleaded for us to stay out of it, so we reluctantly did.
Besides, we heard that Uncle E was packing a gun. Things were really getting ugly, now.
The story we heard was that the few who did go to the farmhouse beat on the door and yelled insults until B finally opened up, whereupon his siblings stormed the place, and E waved a gun in B’s face.
Ever since then, the second oldest daughter (J) and the oldest son E have taken turns making threatening calls and visits to B as his health continues to decline. J and E have both repeatedly threatened to buy an RV to set on the property, since per the will, each of Gramma’s nine kids is entitled to five acres of the land, and so these two claim that they only want to set up a homestead on their rightfully inherited piece of land…and then taunt “so we can start strip mining.”
The last I heard, E successfully petitioned enough siblings AND paid off the local court system (it’s fairly easy to do in Southeastern Kentucky to this day, especially if you’re good on the friendly Southern style, the arrogant male stereotype, the sales pitch and double-talk like E is). In paying off the court system, he changed the inheritance from saying each sibling is entitled to five acres upon their mother’s death to saying the last sibling standing gets all fifty acres to do with as they please.
Meanwhile, several siblings complain that they never did see any inheritance money at all from the proceeds of the house in Florida, or of what money Gramma had left at death. They accuse the eldest daughter M of having squandered it.
That, on top of the long-standing complaints that M was skimping on sending out yearly cash payments to her siblings every time Kentucky government issued a check to Gramma for the natural gas they’d been tapping from the family farm property for decades.
And then, through all this, M gets saddled with her own grandkids for about a year. This is another side drama that’s been going on for 12 years. Her HepC son had married a woman and had two children by her. Then they split up. The woman gets chronically ill with Fibroids or something, and dumps the children on her ex, who can’t take care of them because he’s a severely ill HepC patient who’s also mentally ill. So he dumps the kids onto his mom. She takes care of the kids for up to a year and a half at a time before their mom demands her kids back again with scarcely a thank you and defintely not ever any sort of reimbursement or gift. It’s more like she shows up with law enforcement in case M decides to refuse her the kids!
Now, ask me if I know if any of the financial rumours and accusations against M have truth to them. I will answer honestly - I just don’t know. I thought I knew. I thought I was on M’s side. But after all the stuff I hear even from my own mom these days, and the letters I’ve gotten from M these last few years, I have to say I’m DEFINITELY not on E’s side. But I just don’t know if M is being financially honest, either.
And with this very long story - constantly being told in parts here in this journal and orally to friends and aquaintances - here is where I admit to why I am so strongly drawn to genealogical research: I want to be able to love my family again and feel family pride and kinship again. And I can only do that on paper as it were, wildly fitting puzzle pieces together like some crazed recluse locked away in solitude trying to make sense of the world.
My secure warm world that I had trusted for so long was shattered in my first year of college. Within two years of that, I forsake my Baptist Fundamentalist upbringing, which was so strongly tied to the Appalachian family.
I was very angry at the family, and angry at my mom for all the Christian fundamentalist lies. Everything I had ever known to trust could no longer be trusted.
You know how Mulder in the TV series The X Files spends his entire existence searching for the little green men who took his sister from him in childhood?
Well, I’ve just realised that Genealogy is my little green men.
Knowing that now on a conscious level actually quite depresses me.
You know how Rowan forsake her family for science, only to be drawn back into the Mayfair history by Lasher in Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour?
Well, I fear I’ll somehow be pulled back to my aweful family, just like Rowan was to hers. The ghost will get me sooner or later, quite possibly through the genealogical research that I’m so drawn to.
And yet, everyone has a story. Everyone has something they live for. My boyfriend has his band and music, for example.
I guess I have genealogy. But am I doomed by it or can I hope to transcend my feelings of betrayal and abandonment, lies and deceit?
And can I transcend these things soon, so as to live the second half of my life in peace? Can I allow myself to find new warmth and security and truly feel safe and loved?
That story has not yet been written.
