“Mama, what town in Tennessee was Grandma born in?” my daughter asked over the phone. When I told her the name of the small town, which I really didn’t think was even a town anymore, she said, “I thought that was it! I saw it on the map. That’s close to the place where the ambulance took the kids after the wreck last week!” Thankfully her children are recovering well from an accident that happened over Christmas when we were all together in Tennessee.
“Really? You mean it still exists?” I exclaimed. I had looked for it on the map many times, but it didn’t show up. She told me she wrote in the name on a Google search, and there it was. I knew that Mama and some of her siblings had gone there to look up an old family cemetery many years ago, but I remembered little about it. We kids had grown up listening to our mother reminisce about her beloved Tennessee, from which she had moved at the age of 12 when her family relocated to southwest Texas at the urging of an uncle.
I promptly clicked on it, and Google brought up the name of the cemetery and a picture of the landscape. A beautiful view of rounded mountains loomed dark green in the background of a grassy expanse, and I was instantly transported to Mama’s remembered environment. What a strange, familiar feeling I sensed; it almost brought tears to my eyes. She had always talked about the mountains, and preferred to raise her family in the country, just as when she was growing up. As I scrolled down the page, one picture in a set of photographs showed a headstone. Dalton! That was the surname of Mama’s step-mother before she married my grandfather when my mother was three years old. The commemorative stone was honoring the family as the longest residents of the area--200 years!
As I looked at the map, I saw familiar names of towns I remembered from genealogy papers I used to have as places of marriages, births, and deaths of members of her clan: Tazewell, Sneedville, War Creek! Then I saw something wending near the cemetery that surely must have meaning--Old Mill Creek. Mama had entertained us many times with stories of her idyllic-sounding life as a child, harvesting apples from their mountain-side orchard, going to the country store owned by her Uncle Robert on a horse, and riding her horse to take corn to the mill to be ground! This must have been the mill the creek was named for!
I couldn’t find out more without joining a genealogy site, but my interest is surely piqued! I can’t believe we actually lived not more than a hundred miles from my mother’s early home for several months a few years ago and didn’t explore it. Our daughter lives there still, so on our next visit, I definitely intend to do some ancestry searching of my own. Mama always said her (step) mother was society-minded, and maybe she had a reason! As one of the oldest families in the area, they were probably quite prominent before moving away to Texas. Just one more reason to go delving into the dim, distant past. After all, if you don’t know where you came from, you can’t know where you’re going!
Agreed. It's good to know your 'beginnings'!
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking a lot about mine lately, too. My great-great grandmother was a Cherokee indian from Tennessee who married a German settler in the area. My grandmother told me this when I was a child and no other family members seem to know much else about them.
Hopefully, your search is a fruitful one!