Tyrrell County, Day One

On Monday, October 13, I drove from Philadelphia to Tyrrell County, North Carolina.  

It rained until Virginia.  When the skies cleared, I entered an unending T-Mobile dead zone, which left me without that directive yet reassuring little voice that says “In a half mile, remain in the right lane and turn right onto US 17 South.  Turn onto 17 South!” 

At 20 miles long, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnels was a far longer and more beautiful crossing than I had imagined.  Everything was shimmering, silvery and ethereal.

After the bridge, I made a few wrong turns and had a few time-wasting off-road adventures.  Everything looked the same to this traveler: flat farm fields, planted with yellowed soy beans that shone golden in the late light, broken by the occasional cotton field and long expanses of forested swamp. 

As I got closer to my destination, Columbia, the billboards began to advertise Outer Banks destinations, and the horizon began to promise nearby water.  I spotted a road sign that said “red wolf crossing.”  There was a subtle shift in the landscape, a sense of increasing wildness and isolation.

It did not feel like going home.  It felt like going toward something unknown and unaltered by the 21^st century, a perfect landscape for travelling back in time, hunting ancestors.

It was also blackpowder deer hunting season in North Carolina, I learned after I checked into the Brickhouse Inn.  Two hunters in the room across the hall from mine were also traveling back in time, using muzzle-loading rifles to recreate an earlier hunting experience. 

I was about to learn just how much Tyrrell County -- with its sparse development, swamps, forests and humidity -- welcomes retrospective pursuits.

Ready, set, go -- down home!

I have procrastinated, delayed, watched the weather, finally decided on a mode of transportation, stopped my mail delivery and in five days, I’ll be in Columbia, NC for a short week of research.  I’ll stay at the Brickhouse Inn B&B, and spend my time in courthouses, libraries and cemeteries, trying to establish a feel for a past I've never known. 

In the past few weeks, I’ve discovered Facebook groups that I wish I’d known about a year ago!  There’s  the North Carolina Genealogy Network, the Tyrrell County Genealogy group, and the Washington County Geneaology group.  Great group of serious researchers, some of whom are familiar to me, such as Taneya Koonce and Shannon Christmas. 

Through these groups, I’ve discovered some new relatives, learned that I’ll be missing the 23^rd annual Scuppernong River Festival by two days, and generally found myself moving out of the abstract world of family trees, old photos and paper ephemera and into an excited anticipation of being in the present and among the living in a different landscape.

I’m planning to visit Somerset Place, and hopefully, with one of my DNA relatives from Virginia.

My next post will be from Down Home.

plantation houses

There is the process of going home, and the process of letting go of the idea of ever being able to go home again.  The letting go is easier when the house becomes less desirable -- through ruin, redesign or reputation. 

The first time I wrote about my childhood home was in Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments in 2011.  A year later, I saw the house for the first time since it was sold in the fall of 2004, five months after my mother died.  It was occupied in 2012, but leased.  The buyer who purchased it from my mother’s estate had moved away. 

This month I saw it again -- once in late afternoon light, a second time in morning rain. Ten years after buying it, and making surprising, large structural changes in some parts of the property and almost no changes in others, the owner has put it on the market.

The lawn looked parched and the unoccupied house, lifeless.  The 35 online photos posted by the realtor showcase an empty house where first floor period decorating has been cobbled together with a finished attic that looks like an Ikea ad.  The only change that appeals to me is the use of a warm cocoa paint in the foyer, oddly similar to the original shade my mother chose for the entire downstairs in 1952.

The house that was so long Home to me was not a plantation house.  No crops were grown in the subdivision.  It was a make-believe post-war plantation house, one that incorporated white columns to suggest a storied past.  Now it has that, and the stories are sad.

Yesterday I read Derek Walcott’s poem, “Ruins of a Great House.” 

It seems that the original crops were limes, he writes, Grown in the silt that clogs the river’s skirt;/ The imperious rakes are gone, their bright girls gone/The river flows, obliterating hurt.”

Decay overtakes institutions that were once powerful, in St. Lucia and in small towns in western Pennsylvania.  My childhood home has not fallen into physical ruin, and its institutional power was limited to a small, nuclear family. 

But there is some familiar sense of the tragic attached to that empty house.  My parents’ dreams were the original crop, grown in fertile discontent and escapism. 

The original house reflected my mother’s Southern roots, her fantasy attachment to a lifestyle she had never lived down home in Washington County, North Carolina.  (Well, maybe there had been a few imperious rakes.)

The house is a clash of dreams: built to evoke plantation on three lots in the North; altered by its current owner to insert modernity where it seems least needed; designed and redesigned for hospitality, but uninhabited, ghostly, and a place you don’t go back to. 

Home, remembered and revisited

I've been traveling since the last post -- out to Minnesota for a week for my daughter's wedding, then back home to Philadelphia.

There is never just one home.  My daughter grew up in Wisconsin, which was once Home.  Then I moved back to Pennsylvania, my home state, and even though she remained in the Midwest, she referred to her visits to Philly as "coming home."

She has been comfortably at home in St. Paul and Minneapolis, but soon Home will be an apartment with her new husband in a new city.  Only two hours away from me, now there will be weekends when she visits.  She will probably call it Going Home to visit Mom.

I was only a few months old when my mother took me down home for the first time. That's my grandfather, Ben Snell, holding me, the second born of his grandchildren.

The last time I'd go down home to the farm on Mill Pond Road, I'd be 18, a college freshman who was trying to carry an impossible academic load, partying too much, caught between grandiose, manic ideas about what I could accomplish and the gravitational pull of freedom.  There is no picture from that visit.

In the 17 years in between, there were visits to the farm in tandem with Outer Banks beach vacations.  To me, they were visits to relatives, but not a homecoming, even though I'd been going there since infancy.

The house where I grew up in western Pennsylvania was sold in 2004.  The house in the picture above was torn down long before that.  They are places that no longer exist as they were, except in pictures and, less reliably, in memory.  They are no longer Home.

I'm not sure what I'll find when I travel to North Carolina.  Landscapes that may or may not look familiar.  Graves.  Documents.  People who know things I don't know.

This week I learned that there is a 93 year-old relative with a sharp memory still living in the area that was my mother's Down Home.  I am hoping that bits of my family history reside in her mind, that somewhere in that trip, there will be a kind of homecoming of memory.

A little color

Earlier this year, when I was telling a friend about my interest in my Southern mother’s family, he asked “So you have a little color in you?”  When we met, we both had blue eyes, straight hair.  But he had a little color.

Not me. For most of my life, I believed I was of only European ancestry. I have light eyes that have turned hazel with time; skin that burns, then tans; a vanilla exterior that will always seem colorless, thanks to my known English, Irish, French and German ancestry.

When I married a second generation Greek American, my mother started reading Edith Hamilton. “Did you know that the Greeks were originally blondes with blue eyes until they were invaded by the Moors?”  She seemed triumphant.  The fantasy that that my husband had a little color in him seemed to validate something she suspected, something that would define him long before his grandparents landed at Ellis Island. 

It wasn’t until I saw a picture of my great-great grandmother in 2000 that I began to wonder whether my maternal line might have ancestry other than European, and if so, whether that most intimate and lost knowledge was discoverable.

This week I uploaded my 23andme raw autosomal genetic information to Gedmatch in the hope that their admixture tools would provide more information about our supposed Native American ancestry.

Their tools gave me bits and pieces of NA identifications, ranging from .06 percent Artic-Amerindian to .21 percent Amerindian – some modeled results with more than one NA designation, which could be totaled, but never to more than 1 percent.

My African admixture, however, was expressed in ranges from a conservative .82 to wildly speculative 19.66 percent, with Sub-Saharan ancestry in the 1.06 to 8.06 range. 

I’ve included the genome painting from one of the admixture tools, Ethiohelix. Turquoise blue, which is by default called French, is my predominant European ancestry. But on every genome, there are splotches of orange—large and small – and elsewhere, bits of red and yellow and cornflower blue. 

I do have a little color.   

These admixture tests are scientific, yet impressionistic.

Somewhere between colonial America and this digital painting were people who knew who was in their family, people who lived in fear of the “one drop rule,” of the hypo-ascendancy that racial identities could confer.  There were also people who hid what they knew, even after to social consequences had changed, understanding the titillating, gotcha moment of discovery and revelation.

Family, not admixture calculators, are where real information lies.  I have no family to ask about my Gedmatch results.  Next month, in North Carolina, I’ll be talking to strangers.

Mary Ann's story

There is one woman in my maternal line whose story haunts me.  Mary Ann Armstrong Parisher, born in 1835 in Tyrrell County, North Carolina to parents William Graham Armstrong and his wife Mariah, my great great grandmother, appears in a picture given to me by a Parisher family researcher to be biracial or tri-racial.  

There are several reasons why her appearance and unknown racial identity are of special interest to me:

1.  Her father, William G. Armstrong, and his father, Holloway Armstrong, were both slave holders.

2.  A various times throughout Mary Ann's life, there were "free colored" members of Armstrong households.  In the 1850 and 1860 Tyrrell County, NC census rolls (and earlier) we find people with the surnames Hill, Bryan and Rousom in the households of Mary Ann's father, her grandfather, Holloway Armstrong, Charlotte (his widow), and other Armstrong kin (Jones D. Armstrong, and Bennett Armstrong.) Sometimes, as in the case of Micajah Rousom, a member of Mary Ann's household when she was a girl, they were apprenticed children.  

3.  Members of those three families living in Armstrong households are free persons of color identified in census records as black or mulatto.  Those surnames are also associated with Native families of Tyrrell County.  It seems likely that the Hills, Bryans and Rousoms who lived with the Armstrongs were not only biracial, but tri-racial.  (Alternate spellings: Bryant, Rowsom, Rowsome)

4.  Mary Ann's mother, Mariah, had both the maiden and surname Armstrong. I have not yet been able to find a record of Mariah's parents.

5.  Which brings me to a question that I'm hoping my trip Down Home might answer: were the Hills, Bryans and Rousoms, who were related to each other, also related to the Armstrongs?  

The Women's Stories

Both of my parents lost their mothers before I was born.  

My dad did not talk about his mother, but my mother spoke often of hers, and always as if Inez Chesson Snell had been an angel.  She could sing beautifully, play the piano by ear, make a dress without a pattern.  Quick to laugh, resourceful, a woman of faith, humor and resilience. My mother would sometimes examine my hands and declare them a genetic copy of Inez's hands.

The underlying message was that this lovely good woman who I never had the chance to know did not deserve the hard life she led with her alcoholic, irresponsible husband.  She did not deserve to die at 50 of stomach cancer, wasted and skeletal thin.  

My mother often seemed stuck in loss.  I would give anything in this world to have a mother, she would say, especially when she was making the point that I did not seem to appreciate her.  And although I don't think she ever told me that her mother would have adored me, I liked to think that would have been the case.  

Fact is, I didn't have the opportunity to know any of my four grandparents, not the women who died before I was born, not the men who showed no interest in me.

And so I am drawn to this lovely, imagined, magical woman, who was a hauntingly beautiful child, as if she were the ancestor who could serve as the link to all family stories.

Without a male relative to genotype, mitochondrial DNA is all I have to tell our story.  And so it becomes women’s stories.  Me; my mother; Inez; her mother, Sarah Parisher Chesson; her mother, Mary Ann Armstrong Parisher; her mother, Mariah Armstrong.

Mary Ann Armstrong is the last for whom I have a picture.

Mariah Armstrong is the last woman in my maternal line for whom I have a name.

My mother is the last for whom I have a story, and even that is incomplete.  I don’t really know about her life Down Home, before she settled down, became a mother and a Northern housewife.  

I often imagine that it was wild, and full of secrets.  Actually, I’m pretty sure it was.