Nearly two weeks ago, I was talking with a friend about my plans to try to incorporate wedding traditions from both my mother’s side of the family, and my father’s sides of the family. My mother is 100% Appalachian, her father from a line of farmers in Tennessee and her mother from a line of coal workers in Kentucky. Her parents married and settled in Kentucky, where their first two children were born, before they moved up to Detroit to have the rest of the family. But to their dying day, my mother’s parents had thick Southern speech and ways. About half of their nine children carried on the Southern ways; I have a three uncles and two aunts who talk Southern, who have a modest living, and they listen to country music. One of my uncles lives on the family farm in Kentucky to this day.
Since I spent most of my time with my mother growing up, I got to see a lot of her family. I was a country girl descended - I romped in the forests and I climbed 50-foot and higher pine trees and climbed atop garage roofs. I was a total tomboy. Later in life, I learned to be a hard worker like my Ma; when I was a teen she taught my brother and I how to lay carpet, how to build closets, how to create door and window frames, how to lay insulation into the walls and attic, how to hang drywall, how to plaster and patch and paint walls. All of this in a little one-story depression-era ramshackle house my Ma bought in 1983 because we could no longer afford the two-story home with basement and upstairs, and two-car garage that my Ma won in the divorce from my dad.
I got to see the family farm in Kentucky for the first time in 1989 when I was 17 years old. Grampa was dying. We went down to visit him in the hospital, which he always called ‘the vet’, and said they’d prolly treat horses better than people there. I had just graduated high school. He passed away about five months later, in November of that year, and for the first time in my life, I got to see the family torn apart like the Hatfields & McCoys. I never knew such greed from my uncle - he swooped right in and tried to make gramma sell the property in Kentucky so that all the kids could rise up and have better lives. Gramma was making a tiny amount of money every year from the state, who tapped natural gas on her 50-acre property. This wasn’t enough to spread over nine kids though and gramma knew it. But my uncle had bigger plans in mind; he wanted to strip-mine the property and make bank by selling off the natural resources. He reasoned that natural gas wasn’t the only thing in the ground, and he didn’t want the state taking from the family for peanuts any longer. He wanted to be in control of the family fortune, he’d said. This set off a huge family feud, and eventually gramma was deemed too fragile to stay on the farm by herself any longer. None of her nine kids wanted to go to Kentucky to stay on the farm with her and care for her. Gramma went to live in Florida with her eldest daughter. It was then that her youngest son ran for the family farm and holed up there as soon as gramma vacated the property, because he said the eldest son would be on his way to steal the property and strip-mine it and keep all the profit to himself.
On many occasions, the greedy uncle went down to the farm to threaten his baby brother, and he waved a gun around. The baby brother waved a shotgun back and stayed put, all these years. No one is taking the family farm and destroying the property. It’s a family heriloom, he’d say. He didn’t trust the eldest boy to be fair with the rest of his siblings. And the baby brother had some siblings who agreed with him, and the eldest brother had some siblings who agreed with him. My Ma is in the camp with her baby brother; she doesn’t want the property dug up and sold off and doesn’t trust her other brother, also younger than she, to keep his promise to rise up all his siblings out of poverty.
When gramma passed away in 2003, the feud was renewed. It had been many years since I’d been to Kentucky. I went and took my man with me. It was his first time ever seeing Kentucky and the ways of families and people from there. He got to see the feud first hand with me. He immediately took up the side of my Ma and my brother and I, and I was glad of it. He can see the greed emanating from my uncle, too.
Another incident occurred, on the day of gramma’s funeral - the greedy uncle went to the family farm across the holler from where gramma was just buried. We pleaded with him not to go. I cried. He and the siblings that are on his side went with him to the farm while we stayed at the neighbor’s house. Gun waving ensued. Greedy uncle busted his way into the farmhouse and threatened his baby brother, who was now dying of emphasema and on an oxygen tank. He didn’t care if he caused such a stir so as to excite his baby brother and cause his death, no.
That was 2003. My youngest uncle is still dying of emphysema, and you know what? One of the sisters who was on the greedy uncle’s side - she’s now diagnosed with emphysema, too, and her husband lay dying of stomach cancer.
The family is forever torn apart, like the Hatfields & the McCoys. And for what - the false promise of wealth and betterment, when all anyone ever wanted was to live on the family farm in peace - to live out their days in Kentucky on that beautiful property with the memories created of living on the farm, of neighbors and friends.
And yet, I was given pictures and memories and stories - a rich oral tradition handed down from my Ma which was given her by her Ma - the history of our family in Kentucky and Tennessee. Who’s related to who, who lived where. Mythologies, superstitions - passed to me since I was able to remember.
I began writing down our genealogy when I was a kid - perhaps about age 14. I never forgot this history. When I was introduced to computers and the Internet by some friends after I graduated college, I immediately took my history to that level.
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my Appalachian family, with my roots, with my Self ever since 1989 when I got to see the family I loved so much tear themselves apart so viciously. I wanted no part of that heritage. I hated country music. I joined in with others in making fun of Appalachian people. I still do to this day - I have this love-hate relationship - but at least now I can listen to country music and bluegrass without wanting to slit my throat. Something started to change in me with my gramma’s death. I got to see the locals in Barbourville, KY, and how generious and hospitable they are. Something I so deeply craved to have again in my own family, which is gone forever it seems, but I saw it still alive in that town. At the same time, my grampa’s sister treated me like dirt - she called us yanks and told me I looked like a reporter to come take the family history away. She didn’t trust me. Other family members did but she didn’t. That’s when I started to change. Although angry with my great aunt, I started to grow less hostile towards mountain people, because I’d seen that outside of my own blood ties, there’s still a rich tradition of love and good ol’ Southern Hospitality. I was amazed and grateful. Whenever I have time to work on the very long list of names from my Appalachian side of the family, I always have bluegrass playing to keep me focused on the heritage, the PEOPLE, their stories.
So when my man and I started discussing wedding plans, I decided to incorporate all aspects of my family genealogies into the wedding if I could. After all, my man is only about 1/4 or less Scottish, but he’s going to wear a full kilt to represent his Scottish lineage at the wedding. So why can’t I represent ALL my lineages?
So over a week and a half ago, I did a google search for “appalachian weddings” and found Appalachian Wedding Adventures. I bit my lip, drew a deep breath, and phoned up the lady. I explained to Janice what I was looking for, and gave a very brief history of my family in Kentucky, and said I wanted to incorporate any traditions she might know about. She asked if I’d seen a movie called Songcatcher. I said no. She told me I’d better watch that movie, then. And then she wished me good luck in finding any so-called “Appalachian wedding traditions” and told me to give her a call if I ever find any myself.
Well I just watched the movie today and Janice’s wisdom is abundantly clear. And it stings and makes me think my great aunt Gladys at my gramma’s funeral, calling me a yank and a reporter and being very distrustful. She died five months after my gramma did. And the character Tom Bledsoe in the movie Songcatcher reminds me of great aunt Gladys, too. He’d said that the one thing outlanders never could get through their heads was that mountain people just want to be left alone.
I’m an outlander. A damned yank. Not one of them.
I have no heritage to welcome me - it’s all been forsaken. This is exactly why I have held onto genealogy so much over the years - in an effort to be PART of a heritage again - to be PART of a culture, to be PART of a FAMILY.
But that was all destroyed by the time I was seventeen. It’s time for me to move on. But how? I don’t know how. I’ve wanted for so long to just belong. I didn’t belong in school either - since 5th grade. I was picked on and beat on and mocked and gum spat in my hair and called Carrie by mean kids. I didn’t go to prom because I was convinced that the boy who out of the blue asked me to prom was One Of Them and that they really would pour pig’s blood on me. The boy even had eerily similar curly hair as the boy in the movie who’d asked Carrie to prom. Freaked me the fuck out.
Anyway, touching on my father’s sides of the family for a moment - he never had tradition there, either. His father was 100% Polish but he and his siblings had changed their last name to an Americanised last name because they were tired of being singled out as Polacks and being branded as troublemakers and strikers and commies or worse. And with so many Poles having been executed by Hitler in WWII, American Poles were so afraid that if anyone ever found their identity, or their children’s, or their children’s children’s, that they’d all be sent to concentration camps, too. So my dad grew up being told he was Finnish and German, when he was really half Polish.
His mother was a mix of Scottish and Canadian. Her father was 100% Scottish and her mother was Canadian, but of English heritage about a generation or two removed. When my father’s father hooked up with this English/Canadian woman, his sisters disowned him. My uncle has vivid memories of his aunts telling him and my father that they were bastard children because their parents were never married properly. By that they meant that my grandfather, who grew up staunchly Polish-Catholic, married a woman who grew up Baptist, and they were married in a Baptist church, not a Catholic church. So his sisters, my great aunts, never considered it a valid marriage. “They were like Cruella de Vil“, my uncle told me in 2004.
My paternal grandmother was an only child, while my paternal grandfather was one of nine. But neither carried much of their traditions on to their two boys - my father and my uncle. They grew up knowing of Scottish heritage, and that’s about it. They never had strict religion in the house - it was never pushed on them, which is good of course. They never had culture though. No music and genealogy passed down. Just an old shirtbox with photos of people with first names only written on the back. It was my Ma who pressed my grandma in her later years to please share any history she had, for the sake of her grandchildren.
My Ma, the Appalachian, who only ever knew that you pass on your heritage. Thank her for that.
So I still want to incorporate my heritage into the wedding. I’m Appalachian. I’m Polish. I’m Canadian. I’m Scottish.
I don’t care if people say I’m an outsider. I don’t care what they believe to be true. I know who I am. I know where I came from. You can’t take away my ancestral longings and memories.
I’ll incorporate what I can remember from my own immediate family, and I’ll add what I can here and there from traditions I find in books and online to make it more special for me.
That’s what it’s all about, after all.
It’s MY DAY, right?
Well then. STFU with all your “outlander” bullshit.
This song wasn’t in the movie, but it’s been stuck in my head since towards the end of the movie. It’s called Wayfaring Stranger and is a traditional folk song, sung here by the band Ego Likeness, a band I fell in love with at Convergence XI in San Diego in 2005.
Incidentally, there is a town named Jordan in Kentucky. It’s 373 miles west of our family farm in Barbourville, KY, likely over treacherous mountain passes. Where had this wayfaring stranger gone to? Had this stranger traveled far west, east, north or south in their time away from home? How far did this stranger have to go to get back home?
