Seeing the Past Clearly

On February 26, I had elective eye surgery that's resulted in more than a month without normal vision, and much of that time in quarantine.

My life has become a series of workarounds: how can I complete a deadline piece of reading or writing without being able to sit down at my laptop and work as usual? what can I do around the house while tearing and in pain instead of reading or writing? how can I pass the time when I have a highly contagious viral conjunctivitis when I can't leave the house, or read, or write, or watch Netflix on a back-lit screen? how can I meet deadlines for car inspection, taxes, grant applications, online teaching and bill paying without vision or contact with the world?

Somehow, I found a way to get through that time.  I still don't have the quality of vision that I had before I elected to "improve" it, but have seen significant healing in the past few days, just in time to join the other 3500 members and catch up with RootsMOOC, the free online genealogy course being offered by the State Library of North Carolina.

I'm hoping that the determination to find workarounds for my activities of daily living without eyesight will kick in again as I tackle my family research.

March, that lost month, is over, and I'm looking to April for new starts.

Playing for Duppies

In the 2012 Kevin McDonald documentary, “Marley,” there’s a recounting of how early in their career, Bob Marley and the musicians who would be known as The Wailers gained confidence in their ability to perform in public by playing in cemeteries to spirit inhabitants, duppies. 

Those are tough rooms to play only if you believe that spirits have agency to register their displeasure. 

Beginning a genealogical research project involves a certain amount of playing for duppies.  There’s the time literally spent in cemeteries, yes, but there are other more haunting audiences. 

There’s the expert genealogical community – specialists whose knowledge base can be so very intimidating when we first set out.  Although I have learned more than half of what I know about my family -- and the circumstances of their lives -- from others, and am tremendously appreciative of their generosity, I sometimes feel that the more expert among them are annoyed by my ignorance.

Yet the people who genealogist Renate Sanders calls our genea-friends are in many ways the spirits, the practice audience for our blood relatives, which can be a truly hard room to play.  The distant cousins I’ve met through genetic testing and genealogy Facebook groups have been easier to talk to than the three living first cousins that I haven’t spoken to in decades. 

The genea-friends have been kind spirits, people upon whom we practice our family narratives, who help us get it right, let us know when we’ve played the wrong chord.

When I feel I've gotten it right – can write about how my family lived and stayed in and left that Down Home place, I’m not sure my cousins will like or agree with my interpretation of our history.  But I’ll feel good about how I've gathered and checked and vetted the information before it’s presented to them.  

I'll be glad I lingered for a long time in a quiet place, listening to the critiques of the whispering dead and their living familiars.

Ending 2014 with thoughts about my 2 percent

In the past year, I’ve uploaded my 23andme autosomal raw data to all Gedmatch admixture calculators, DNA Tribes and Family Tree DNA (where I have mtDNA results on file).  I sought out guidance on the accuracy of the tools that I’d used, and suggestions for better products. 

I wanted scientific precision, but have settled for impressionistic results that vary from tool to tool but basically reach a similar conclusion:  my ancestry is 98% European and 2% Something Else.

At 23andme, that Something Else is Unidentified.

At FTDNA’s “My Origins,” that 2% of my ancestry came from North African and Asia Minor.

At any of the Gedmatch admixture calculators, that 2% or more is +/- some combination of Amerindian and Sub-Saharan African, usually with a higher portion of non-European identified as African rather than Native.

I am, it seems, a geno-reflection of findings recently published in The American Journal of Human Genetics : “The Genetic Ancestry ofAfrican Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States.”

Using genetic information obtained from 23andme customers, Katarzyna Bryc, et. al concluded “the frequency of European American individuals who carry African ancestry varies strongly by state and region of the US (Figure 3A). We estimate that a substantial fraction, at least 1.4%, of self-reported European Americans in the US carry at least 2% African ancestry. Using a less conservative threshold, approximately 3.5% of European Americans have 1% or more African ancestry (Figure S8). Individuals with African ancestry are found at much higher frequencies in states in the South than in other parts of the US: about 5% of self-reported European Americans living in South Carolina and Louisiana have at least 2% African ancestry.”

Their findings also seem to illuminate my lower percentages of Native to African ancestry:  “Fitting a model of European and Native American admixture followed later by African admixture, we find the best fit with initial Native American and European admixture about 12 generations ago and subsequent African gene flow about 4 generations ago.”

My Native ancestry, which probably entered my “gene flow” in Eastern North Carolina twice as long ago as my African ancestry, has anecdotal roots.  Numerous distant relatives have repeated the story that my great, great grandmother, Mary Ann Armstrong Parisher, had Native ancestry, yet no one seems to know its origins. No one has ever offered up any anecdotal suggestions of African ancestry, even though it is likely that it would have been introduced more recently. Lacking anything but my own genotyping to work with, I suspect that Mary Ann Armstrong might be the source of both my African and Native ancestry.

I accept that I may very well never know the stories that explain my 2 percent --- although I would really, really like to know them.  For now, I’ll have to make do with the knowledge that like many predominantly European Americans with roots in the South that go back more than 400 years, I am a product of intimate knowledge that has been forgotten or hidden for generations, only to surface through genetic testing -- my most intimate level of body knowledge.

That going down home -- delving deep into an invisible storied past -- seems so scientifically possible, yet not.  I've met other people on the same journey, and suspect that in 2015, the journey itself will be what's important.

Down Home for the holidays

We never went Down Home for the holidays, but there were many years when the farm on Mill Pond Road came to us. When the box from Roper arrived, my mother would briefly forget her critical pretensions and delight in the warmth it brought to her in Pennsylvania.  

The contents that I remember best were from the land itself – shiny magnolia leaves for decorating, peanuts, pecans, jams, watermelon rind pickles – and gifts for me that my Aunt Margaret made by hand. 

When I was 10, she made a dark blue velvet dress with a white lace collar for me, with a matching one for my doll.  When I was a teenager, she made me A-line wool skirts with matching hand-knitted sweaters that rivaled the preppy manufacturers’ skirt/sweater sets.  

Those Down Home boxes, so filled with Margaret’s handiwork, never disappointed. What was disappointing – aside from the fact that I only remember two Thanksgivings and no Christmases spent with any relatives – was the Something that my mother missed. 

She’d mention yule logs or shooting guns and fireworks at Christmas.  (Not New Year’s, Christmas!)  She’d mention chess pie or her mother playing the piano and I’d get the feeling that those Depression-era holidays in Washington County, NC had been better than any I would ever know. 

Her brother would send us a Smithfield ham, but still, something was missing.  It was her mother, more than anything else, who had made the Down Home holidays so memorable, so rhapsodic -- Inez, who died when my mother was in her mid-twenties, before I was born. It wasn't the sandy soil or the Spanish moss or the bird dogs or the floating island custard she was missing.  It wasn’t the 400 miles between us and Roper that created the empty space in her life.  It was not having a mother in her 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond. 

I pull out her Lilly Wallace New American Cookbook (1947) and a falling-apart copy of The Joy of Cooking and rifle through the many handwritten recipes tucked between their pages, looking for some remnant of the regionalism she brought North with her.  On withered notepad pages, I find her recipes for corn pudding and spoon bread, white peach pie and sweet potato pie. Always appreciated, but not specifically holiday fare.

I find her scribbled notes for sand tarts, the ones she cut out in the shapes of hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades, dusted with cinnamon sugar, glazed with egg wash and a pecan half.  Down Home for the holidays, I think, and jump to Pinterest to find good pictures of sand tarts, only to find them described as an Amish Christmas cookie.  Really?  Not Southern?

Tell me what I’m missing.  Tell me about the down home holiday foods you remember and still make.  Tell us how you make them, serve them, why you still love them.

Who goes there?

It’s been almost a month since I traveled from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to learn more about my maternal line. Since I got back, I’ve been thinking a lot about people I’ve met along the way and the nature of this journey. 

Although I’ve approached this research as a writer, my own story is probably too small to constitute a book.  I’m not Edward Ball, who wrote Slaves in the Family.  Or Chris Tomlinson, who wrote Tomlinson Hill.  

There may be small-time slave owners in my family, and African-American relatives, and bigotry, and my own non-European ancestry, but I may never stumble upon a narrative that others would find compelling or uplifting.

What I am, it seems, is a writer who keeps meeting other people who have stories to tell.  And even as I struggle with my own narrative – my mother’s bigotry, my family’s secrets, my feelings about the Old South – I am drawn to other people’s stories.  Quintessentially American stories, the good and the bad.

And don’t I just go on meeting people who keep me believing that I’m on the right path!  Today, at a local authors’ event in suburban Philadelphia, I met two people with ties to North Carolina whose life experience seemed to intersect with mine in some way.  This seems to me to be a sign.

A sign that it’s time to open up The Going Down Home Project to other people who have Southern roots that include slavery; people who have moved away from the rural South but still feel its influence in their lives; people whose interest in genealogy has in some way been altered by genetic testing.

It feels right to me at this juncture to find a project collaborator, or to solicit stories from people who’ve delved into their own Southern family histories -- motivated by curiosity, questions or fantasies about identity.

It’s time to invite others to share their stories.

If you have been researching your rural Southern roots, and understand why you’re on this journey, I want to hear from you via mailto:dfries8503@comcast.net

Tyrrell (and Dare and Washington) County, Day 4, Part B

After my long walk on the beach, I drove back to Manteo and browsed through shops near Roanoke Island Festival Park before making arrangements with Sucelia Fahey to meet at the Outer Banks Visitors Center.  She’d gone home and brought along photos of her Hassell grandparents and great grandparents from Tyrrell County, arranged in a weathered window frame.  I remembered that somewhere in my family tree, someone married a Hassell.  In the month ahead, I hope to parse out any possible relatedness.  She was so very nice to share them, and meeting Sucelia at a lunch counter – like most of what happened on this trip – was serendipitous. 

The sun was out, it was still early afternoon, and I realized I had time to drive west from Manteo on Rt 64 to Jamison, and buy peanuts to bring back to Philly.  And buy I did – blister fried, French fried, salted in the shell, two kinds of peanut butter, trail mix -- and peanut ice cream for the road!   It’s good to know I can reorder from Mackey’s Ferry Peanuts, because the share that I kept for myself is dwindling.   Fast.

Once again, I drove by Washington County locations where my mother and her family once lived, without stopping.  Nothing about the area around Roper looked familiar after more than 40 years.  For some reason, it seemed more foreign to me than Tyrrell County, and less navigable.

Exploring Washington County will be on my agenda for the next trip Down Home.

Tyrrell (and Dare) County, Day 4, Part A

Familiar strangers, a strange yet familiar landscape.

Until Thursday, October 16, it had been 44 years since I’d set foot in the soft sands of North Carolina’s Outer Banks.  In researching a piece I wrote for Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments in 2002, and from vacation pictures taken by former co-workers, I realized that the Banks, as I knew them, were only a memory.

And so I felt a need to protect myself from the collision of memory and reality by believing that I could approach the beach on Rt. 64 and quickly head south into Cape Hatteras National Seashore without contact with the new.

That wasn’t the case, but neither did I feel a sense of loss about the built world that confronted me. 

I first stopped at the Outer Banks Visitors Center, where the man behind the counter, John Fast, turned out to be a retired Pennsylvania State Police officer who formerly had been assigned to my hometown, Bedford, PA.  John shared some insights into relocation to the Carolina’s from the perspective of a retired Pennsylvania state employee, which was an amazing coincidence of perspectives.

I asked John for a recommendation for breakfast in Manteo and he directed me to TL’s Country Kitchen, where locals gather, and where I happily ordered a Greek omelet with biscuits.  Eating at the counter, I struck up a conversation with Sucelia Hassell Fahey, a health care professional working on the Outer Banks who just happened to have deep roots in Tyrrell County. 

The lunch counter conversation had turned from infectious disease to genealogy.  I don’t know if we are kin, but Sucelia had pictures at home to share and we agreed to touch base in a few hours. 

I headed south on Rt 12 into the national seashore park, where the dunes have been replenished and re-vegetated over the decades to new heights, and the wide beach in mid-October was luxuriously empty, and reminiscent of the empty beaches I walked on as a child.

That empty beach restored my soul.  Truly.  I was able – through time and space – to have an exhilarating and solitary experience that I’d imagined could no longer be had on the Outer Banks. But it was fall, and miles away from the billion-dollar real estate investments to the north. 

It was perfect.  In fact, there were mirage-like places among the dunes more beautiful than I remember.  Those places seemed sacred.