Driving down the highway

rain is coming down.

In the mirror I see

lights of our town.

The hardest part of going

is always leaving home.

Still, I travel alone.

If I must be lonely,

I’d rather be 

lonely on my own.

When Senor Cortez cried

beneath the tree, wept

for greedy soldiers

whose stolen gold

brackish waters;

what destiny brought

him back upon us

to kill with disease,

with hunger and canons

except the fate that brought

Mexico to these far hills

where she learned to sing

Irish ballads.

I see a hummingbird

hovering in a beam of sunlight

eternity in a moment.

I hear the singing wind

playing tree and dry grass instruments

same singings my ancestors heard.

I feel the earth and sky

beating heart and whispering spirit

groanings of earth, calls of heaven.

I know at life-road’s end

leaving flesh, failures and fruitions

is required and I know that love

is the only luggage the journey allows.

Pink was your favorite

Pink hat, pink shoes

Pink balloons.

On soft summer wind

You leave with them

Floating high

Sing, lil Cassie, sing

Fly, Cassie, fly

Always free

We stand

we watch

Five hundred hearts

One for each

Pink Balloon

excerpt from Hodgepodges, Snapshots and What-Nots, Three Kentucky Voices

While waiting

for song of quiet night

I wandered away

You got married

twice

What happened

to barefoot girl

in the white dress

She fell

then dreamed herself

to life, to light

Now she walks

with the sun

is Whispering Wind

Archangel

do you still find zen

playing Pooh Sticks

on English bridges

I found this wonderfully interesting series on youtube. I will write about the history of Ireland, but I do feel this series is worth the watching for anyone who takes pride in their “Irishness” or wants to learn the history of their Irish ancestors. I hope you all enjoy.

Story of Ireland

Celtiberian Days

At this point, I am uncertain where the first inhabitants of Ireland came from, but science is saying that they shared DNA with the early inhabitants of Iberia, so maybe they were a branch off that a same tree. Or maybe they came down from Scotland. Whoever they were, archeologists believe they got there somewhere between 7,000 and 6,000 BC. We are told that they lived by farming, fishing and gathering food such as plants and shellfish. They mostly lived on the seashore or along rivers and lakes where food and water were both easier to get. They hunted deer, birds, wild boar and seals.

About the time one of those skeletons I mentioned in my earlier article, 4,000 BC, lived, farming came about. The farmers raised  sheep, pigs, cattle and crops. They made pottery during this time, too. For hundreds of years, the farmers lived right alongside the hunter-gatherers but in time, farming prevailed and the old lifestyle faded.

These early farmers cleared the forests, built monuments (burial mounds called court cairns) and cremated their dead before burying them in stone galleries which they covered with earth.

Dolmens, created by these early Irish folks, were burial sites where massive vertical stones were lined up with horizontal stones on top of them to create a passage way then covered with earth. It was during these early pre-Celtic times that Stonehenge and other amazing, mysterious structures were built. William Stuklely, I think it was, linked the Celts (Druids) to the building of these megalith monuments, but the Celts hadn’t even arrived yet when these places were built. For the record, dolmens aren’t only found in Ireland. They can be found in Basque Country and as far away as Russia. There are even dolmens in Korea (but I don’t think they’re connected to the Irish ones). Click here to visit a site that shows you what they looked like.

Around 2,000 BC, bronze showed up in Ireland and people began using it to make tools. During this period, they erect large stone circles and built crannogs or habitations on the lakes. These lake homes were easier to defend than just building on the shore.

ALONG CAME THE CELTS

People think of Ireland as being Celtic but it wasn’t until about 5oo BC that the Celts actually arrived, bringing with them iron tools and weapons. Scholars don’t really agree on where the Celts originated, but they moved across Europe during the 4th and 5th centuries. The British Isles, in time, came to be known as the “six Celtic Nations,” which included Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Briton and the Isle of Man. There were four major Celtic dialects that came to the Isles with them: Breton, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh. The warlike Celts, divided Ireland into many small kingdoms that constantly fought with each other, but the Celts didn’t just subdue the original Irish, they absorbed their culture into their own until the new Irish culture was a blend and Irish Celts were heavily influence by Pre-Celtic Ireland. Evidence of this is found in the engravings at Newgrange which include lozenges, spirals, double spirals, concentric semi-circles, zigzags and so forth, all of which were found in Ireland before the coming of the Celts but is found afterwards in Celtic works.

So, the Celts left no religious monuments in Ireland that I am aware of. However, they did bury weapons and metalworks in the ground as sacrifices wot their gods and they did leave behind decorative pagan stone sculptures. The Celts buried their chieftains and leaders with their weapons, tools, drinking horns, food bowls and other things they might need in the afterlife. It seems that much of what archaeologists know of the Celts has come from burial sites.

When the Celts went to battle, they painted their bodies and faces, taking pride in their battlefield appearance. They wore personal adornments and carried elaborately ornate swords, shields, helmets and trumpets. Their metalworks were of gold, silver, bronze and other metals.

Next time, Christianity Comes to Ireland.

Here is a link to a timeline of Irish history for anyone interested.

I never heard the word Melungeon until I was a grown woman and my aunt brought me an article about Elvis Presley and Abraham Lincoln being “Melungeons” and told me about a book by Brent Kennedy.

My aunt, who is probably reading this blog post, told me that she believed we might be “Melungeons” because our family on my mom’s side had originally come from Hawkins and Hancock County Tennessee and with a list of names like Blevins, Collins, Sizemore, Gibsons, Bowlings, etc., it certainly did seem possible.

So began my research. I discovered no less than 30 surnames in my mom’s family tree that were known Melungeon surnames, coming from known Melungeon areas. Proving that she was or wasn’t Melungeon was something else again. And if she was a Melungeon? Then what? What did that mean anyway? And did my dad have Melungeon ancestry, too? If so, what did that mean for me? I contemplated DNA testing when it first came out but I was scared of it. I doubted it’s accuracy and I questioned what the testing companies would do with my info.

I watched a PBS special on Melungeons and read Jesse Stuart’s Daughter of the Legend. There was definitely something drawing me to these people and I just couldn’t let it go. I then read Brent Kennedy’s work and I thought that he had a coon treed, so to speak. I got online and googled as much as I could. There wasn’t as much info out then as there is now on Melungeons, but I was feeling my “Anatolian bump” and sticking my tongue into my “shovel teeth” and nothing how my second toe is longer than my first toe and how the corners of my eyes overlap, I had “almost” black hair, blue eyes and all those “markers” that are supposed to indicate Melungeon heritage. I had every one of them, of course. So, what did that even mean, really? How did it impact my life?

I put it aside for a while. My life got busy and the knowledge of Melungeon heritage got stored in a file in my head as I went about my business. Then, I was asked to give a talk on Melungeons. I reached out to a brilliant researcher name Joanne Pezullo. She sent me amazing links that hadn’t existed during my first stomp through the Melungeon patch.  I will forever be grateful to her for her help in my Melungeon understanding.

Next, I started reading the blog of another amazing researcher, Vance Hawkins and reading works by Richard Carlson. I delved into the Melungeon research done by DNA Consultants and visited every Melungeon site I could find on the internet. I collected articles and looked into local families here in Kentucky.

I finally submitted to the temptation to have a DNA test done, not just one but TWO! I reasoned that if the powers that be wanted my DNA, they had access to it anyway. I mean I worked for a public school system, my off-the-gridness and privacy were forfeited the minute I became a teacher.

By the time it was said and done, and I had run my raw data through multiple calculators and even gone to Standford University’s Genotation, it turned out that I had DNA from 6 out of the 7 continents, so that didn’t tell me the answers I had hoped for. I had segments from the British Isles, Iberia, Basque Country, Slavic, Baltic, Finnish, Native American,  West Africa, Steppe, Anatolian, Southern Asia (Northwest India and Pakistan), and even Scandinavia, specifically Finland. I was thoroughly mixed, therefore, I decided to zero in on the time period when the Melungeons first came into contact with English colonists.

Luckily, 23andMe and CRI Genetics both give you this time line that shows at approximately what time in history certain elements were introduced into your genes. My timeline showed that during the 1700s to early 1800s, I had West African (Mali and Morrocco), Iberian and Native American ancestors. Now, granted, some of that may have been due to my paternal grandfather being Spanish/Native mix but it also coincided with the time of the Melungeon families coming into my line of direct ancestry.

So, I turned my attention to my maternal ancestors who settled in Wayne, Clinton, Russell, Cumberland and Adair County, Kentucky. If you look at a map, you can see that all of these counties are adjacent and center around one important geographical feature, the Cumberland River. They all lived within about 40 miles of each other, if you go as the crow flies, or cross country as they did in the days way back before roads were carved out between the twisting, winding hills of southern Kentucky.

Once upon a time there was a group of people called the Catawba who lived in what is now North Carolina. In 1521, they looked out and saw the coming of a new age and the beginning of the end of life as they had known it for a long time. They saw ships on the horizon. A man named Vasques de Ayallon led a party of Spanish explorers onto their shores for the purpose of luring some friendly Catawba aboard their ship and then sailing away with them, a tactic that seemed to be common among slavers during those days as it would be used on Squanto and some friends about a hundred years later.

 They taught one of these captives to speak Spanish and renamed him Francisco de Chicora, but the next time the Spaniards docked along Catawba shores they were not met by old friends. The Catawba saw them coming and went the other way. And Francisco, he escaped into the wilderness, telling everyone he met that the Spaniards were bad news and pretty soon word spread throughout the peoples of the Atlantic coast to beware of the Spaniards.

But there is an old saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and so it was with the Catawba. Cofitachique, in what I believe to be present-day Camden, South Carolina, was the hubbub of Catawba culture. So when Hernando De Soto encountered the Muskogee (Creek) they told him of Cofitachique, saying that it was a seat of great wealth and prosperity. Of course, De Soto had gold fever and headed out to find Cofitachique.

On May 1, 1540, De Soto and his party came upon a group of Cofiticachique who was led by an impressive woman, but just as Cortez had pretended to befriend Montezuma then took him captive, De Soto did to the Lady of Cofticachique, but she escaped and fled into the wilderness which she knew so well.

The Spanish hoped to colonize Cofitachique and Pedro Menendez de Aviles had the support of the Spanish crown in his efforts to do so. In colonizing the area, the Spaniards intended to keep the area out of the hands of the French, establish St. Elena on the coast and move 120 men, under Captain Juan Pardo, inland to find a land route to New Spain, now known as Mexico. In order to subdue the natives and make them subjects of the Spanish crown, Menendez felt it necessary to convert them to Catholicism, so a Father Sebastian accompanied the expedition as they traveled into the heart of Catawba country. These Iberian explorers lived among the Catawba. I can’t help but wonder what genetic impact they made among the Catawba. I read when researching for my writings on my article about Joe Pabilo, my great-great-grandfather, that many of the explorers had Basque roots. Did some also have Berber roots? Portuguese? Italian? Did contact with Pardo’s men leave a genetic trail among the Catawba? Did these explorers have any connection to the Catawba people later moving north to settle in Melungeon country when England laid claim to their homelands and war and disease decimated their numbers? I can’t help but wonder if the Melungeons they would later turn to in a time of trouble actually originated with Pardo’s men. Some would argue that Melungeons were pure European. Others would argue that they were African men and White women, but whoever they were, they were there when the Catawba came to them, but we’re getting there.  

To make a long story shorter, the Spanish colony among the Catawba failed. In 1572, the Spaniards pulled out of Catawba land and there was a lull in visitors from Europe. In the following years, the Catawba would go to war with the Tucsonans twice and would eventually absorb the last remnants of the weary Yamasee and become a sanctuary for their longtime allies, the Saponi and Tutelo when they sought a place of refuge. These Siouan tribes joined the Catawba, who fate would become their fate, too. The Catawba, Saponi, and Tutelo joined both culturally and genetically. Sometimes, you have to overlook your differences and join forces with your friends and neighbors in order to survive. It’s just a part of being human.

If the Spanish were a threat to the Catawba, the English were a nightmare come true. In 1521, the Catawba and their affiliates claimed 55,000 square miles as their homelands. Around 1670, the English began to show up, in droves. Every immigrant that set up a homestead took a little piece of Catawba homeland and the settlers kept coming. Some came to get rich. Some came as an alternative to English prison, which was horrid. Some came as Irish and Scottish slaves to English overlords. Some came because they were “travelers” i.e. Gypsies that England had expelled; some came for the hunting, the fur trade, they came from England and Ireland. They came from France and from Germany and Switzerland, from Rotterdam and Holland. For whatever reasons, they came, by the hundreds, by the thousands. They came.

Within 90 years of the arrival of the English and all those who came from whatever country, swearing allegiance to the British Crown, few Catawba remained on their once vast lands. In 1759, a Small Pox epidemic wiped out about half of the Catawba-Saponi-Yamasee people, now all considered Catawba. By the following year, their capital had been given an English name, Pine Tree Hill. Eventually, the Catawba agreed to leave Pine Tree Hill and move north to Waxhaw Old Fields. By the terms of the treaty they signed, the Catawba lost their lands in Virginia and much of the Carolinas. They got to keep 2 million acres but most of their ancestral homeland was gone forever.

The Catawba moved into their assigned region but settlers had already set up shop on some of this land and the governor of North Carolina refused to do anything about it because he hadn’t personally signed any treaty with the Catawba and he wasn’t going to honor one or enforce it. White hunters disregarded Catawba land rights and would literally steal the game that Catawba hunters had killed right out of their camps. When their leader, King Haigler, died in 1753, the English king disregarded the Catawba treaty altogether on the grounds that the man who had signed it was dead, and he gave away the rest of Catawba land. A second epidemic of Small Pox had taken another half of their numbers, as well. This once huge group of people was now just a handful and homeless. The English settlement of the Carolinas brought war, disease, death, and poverty to the Catawba people.

When the Revolutionary War broke out and the settlers were fighting against their own kind, the Catawba was completely confused, but one thing they understood was that the British troops would not show them any mercy. They witnessed something that shook them to their foundations. In 1780, when the English took Charleston, they massacred a number of Colonists soldiers at Waxhaw. When the Catawba saw what was happening they knew that there was nothing to stop them from moving to Catawba Town next and doing the same thing to them. Knowing they were in serious trouble, outnumbered and outgunned, they evacuated their homes in the wake of approaching British troops.

Now, I may have to revise this part as I learn more, but to the best of my current understanding, the Catawba basically split up. Some went to live among Monacans, Catawban speaking allies from the days when they were strong enough to have the Catawba Alliance. Some may have gone on toward Roanoke and took up with the Pamunkey. Another group went South and asked the Cherokee, their old enemies, to take them in and they did and some, who had been Christianized by French missionaries, or so that’s what I’ve read, went toward the Melungeons. Did they share a history with the Melungeons? Did they share a cultural connection? Or did they just simply discover a group of people who would offer them a place of refuge?

I promise to write more on this subject in the upcoming days. I also promise to try to be as accurate as I can and when I am finished, I will post a list of sources that I’ve used to learn from. I doubt I will quote anyone, but rather just give you a list so you can read for yourself.

I’m attempting to pick up where I left off with my Catawba story. Now, keep in mind that I am mostly going to focus on those who intermarried with Melungeon families and wound up in Kentucky, but in order to do that, I need to touch on other things as well. In my last post, I established that there was contact between Spanish explorers and their slaves, many who were from Basque Country, North Africa and Italy, as well as Spain and Portugal. Hence, there is a logical possibility that European DNA was introduced into the Catawba and Saponi in the early part of the 1500s. By the 1800s, wars and Small Pox epidemics wiped out the majority of the Catawba people. Struggling to survive, they set out in groups.

After the Revolutionary War, some of them went back to the land they had fled from. In 1826, they leased about half their reservation to Whites and the money they got from this leasing allowed those few survivors of what I call the Catawba Holocaust to survive. But the survival was meager.

 In 1840, the Catawba signed a treaty with the government of South Carolina and sold all but one square mile of their original homeland of thousands of acres. But the treaty was invalidated by the federal government on the grounds that the state of South Carolina didn’t have the right to make it in the first place. Surrounded by Whites on all sides, some of the remaining Catawba went to join the Eastern Cherokee in North Carolina, but the cultural differences were just as pronounced among the Cherokee as they were among the Whites and life among the Cherokee was unpleasant for most of the Catawba. The Cherokee, although willing to extend a hand of mercy, never truly saw the Catawba as their people. All but a few who had intermarried with the Cherokee and one elderly woman who died in 1889, returned to their tiny parcel of land in South Carolina.

Some of these remaining Catawba later moved to Indian Territory in Oklahoma as a result of the Indian Allotment Act. Indians were supposed to receive free land and the excess land was to be sold to settlers and the revenue given to the tribes. Some Catawba went as part of the Cherokee Nation to receive free Indian Land but they were denied the land because the Cherokee knew their own and they knew the Catawba and Melungeons. The White Top Laurel group was considered a mixed people and though they definitely had “Indian” blood, neither the Cherokee nor the federal government would recognize them as Cherokee, so they were denied. It didn’t mean they weren’t “Indian.” It just meant that weren’t the right” Indians. These Catawba remnants who had mingled and become associated with the Melungeons in order to survive were literally being robbed of their identity at every turn. Small Pox, war, forced removal, broken treaties—it was forced assimilation, genocide. By the mid-1800s, the federal government had what it wanted concerning the Catawba people, they basically were “Indian no more.” They had been stripped of everything except their desire to live and provide for their families.

Some of those who went to Oklahoma were received by the Choctaw Nation and literally gave up their cultural ways and identities. They became Choctaw and their descendants live among them to this day. Others met with Mormon missionaries in Oklahoma and became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They continued westward with the Mormons. Still, others returned to the southeastern areas from whence they had come, to Tennessee and Kentucky and Virginia and the Carolinas. I think that it was during this time that my own great grandfather, William Wallen (descended from an unknown gal named Jane Collins) and his wife, Mary Caroline went to receive land but instead of land, they received tuberculosis and William died in Oklahoma. He is buried there. Mary Caroline died back home in Wayne County, Kentucky, and their children were left orphans.

At this point, I need to travel back in time and revisit some things in order to get myself back on track; it does seem that the Christianized Catawba had “English-sounding” names and I won’t even attempt to say where they got them. I suppose that living among English speakers and having taken sides with the colonists in the Revolutionary War may have had some influence on their changing their names. These Christianized Catawba were known to have learned the English language and therefore, it makes sense that they would have also learned the ways of the settlers. The names they carried were names like Collins, Goins, Blevins, Coles, Clonchs, Nuckolls, Moore, Perkins and others. These Christian Catawba were known as “friendly Indians,” and were often found in the company of European settlers. When asked who they were by English settlers, some of them answered that they were “Portugy.” Was there a legend among these people dating back to the days of the Conquistadors? Did they carry the DNA of those long gone explorers?

 Eventually, these families and many others would become the signposts names of Melungeon families. Members from one of these “friendly Indians” groups, the Sizemore (from which I am descended through my maternal grandmother’s father, who was the great grandson of Nancy Sizemore), are suspected by some researchers to have been affiliated with the Catawba but later when they applied for tribal recognition as Cherokee, in hopes of receiving free land, they were denied. The reason they identified as Cherokee is because, at one time after they had been decimated by war and disease, the Catawba were under the jurisdiction of the Cherokee.  Thus was born a trend, numerous families that would populate the southeastern United States and claim Cherokee heritage, only to be turned down again and again by the U.S. government and by the Cherokee nation. The Cherokee didn’t recognize them as Cherokee so the government didn’t recognize them as Indian. For a long time, the world forgot who the Catawba were. Their language was almost completely gone, their culture became a legend and even they forgot who they were, many only remembering that somewhere back in time, Granny or Paw-paw had been “Indian” and they believed it was “Cherokee.” Some settled in the Greasy Rock area and some in Pilot and some in the White Top Mountains, but it appears that others continued to move out from these places. The Sizemore (White Top Laurel Clan who identified as Cherokee but some records indicate they were originally Catawba). These Sizemore seemed to move with the Blevins, Perkins, and Baldwins. Some migrated on into Ohio and are now known as Carmel Indians.  Some migrated to “Indian Territory” in Arkansas and Oklahoma.

I’m skipping a lot of details, mainly because this is an overview, not an all-inclusive, exhaustive and comprehensive breakdown of how Catawba-Melungeon families got to Kentucky.

Many of these families, the names of some which have become lost in the layers of Appalachian soil, migrated to Hancock and Hawkins Counties in Tennessee, and later into the southeastern Kentucky. The last known migrations of these “Melungeons” with Catawba and White Top Laurel ties (census records of the family names, etc.) shows them along the Cumberland River of Kentucky in what is now Rockcastle, Pulaski, Wayne, Clinton, Cumberland, Adair, Russell and Casey Counties. They have married extensively into “old” Kentucky families and in many towns, they WERE the first families to settle the area. Their names and the families they married into either right before coming to the area or right after include Harmon, Easley, Smith, Green, Parnell, Rogers, Adams, Riddle, Ramsey, Sizemore, Leach, Wallen, Neal, Guffey, Denney, Wells, Downey, Starnes/Stearns and others that I can’t think of right now.

 As for those whose descendants aren’t the Christian Catawba they were denied the right to vote until the 1940s, even though they had to pay land taxes and were subject to the same laws as their White neighbors. In 1959, the government completely stripped them of the right to even call themselves Indian and terminated them as a tribe, denying them any and all federal benefits that other tribes received. In 1973, the Catawba applied to be federally recognized. They were small in number and had endured enormous hardships as a people in order to survive. Many of them had long ago lost their identities but a few still clung to the knowledge of who they were and in 1975 they adopted a constitution that had been modeled on their 1944 version prior to the government disbanding them altogether. It wasn’t until 1994 that the United States government recognized the Catawba people as a nation. 

The Christian Catawba who ended up in Kentucky were the victims of genocide and forced assimilation. They were never able to reclaim their status as part of the Catawba Nation.

An interesting side note: the Kentucky River was once called the Catawba River.

Sources:
http://sciway3.net/clark/freemoors/LewisJarvis.html

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~varussel/other/forts.html

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~varussel/landgrants/washcorsurvbk.html

http://vancehawkins.blogspot.com

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catwaba_people

http://historical-melungeons.blogspot.com/p/lewis-jarvis-article.html

“And then he chopped all six of their heads off. He was a great man and the sheriff always knew he could count on Joe Franklin.”

My dad’s brown eyes were wide with excitement and surprise as he told me about the time his great-grandfather killed six outlaws at one time with an ax.

I was ten years old, it was a summer night. I sat at our old aluminum table, barefoot, bare-legged and skinny as a fence post.

“Just one more,” I said.

“Sissy,” Daddy retorted. “It’s done past your bedtime.”

That scene was played out pretty much every night of my childhood. I was always the last kid at the table. I always begged for just one more story, then one more and then one more. I never outgrew my daddy’s stories.

He told ghost stories and old time stories. He told stories about the first Irishmen in Kentucky and stories about when he was a kid, stories about Hank Williams and stories about coon hunting. My daddy had a story about everything, but my favorite ones were about Joe Franklin, my great-great-grandfather. In my dad’s stories, Joe stood larger than Davy Crocket or Sam Houston or Geronimo or Sitting Bull or Daniel Boone. Joe was the ultimate hero in my dad’s stories.

Although many factors in the stories we changeable and had him doing impossible feats, like single-handedly clearing out a “bad house” in Louisville or saving Daniel Boone’s life [never mind that they didn’t live during the same time period.] There were some factors that were consistent. For example, Joe always came from “Old Mexico,” and Franklin was always a name that Joe just took and my dad never knew his real name. Joe had always been stolen from his parents and he always came to Gradyville at thirteen years old and later married a “Dudley” girl.  One other consistent factor in the stories was that his parents had been killed and he had been taken as a slave. Some of the stories had been told to him by his father, who also tended to “stretch” the facts until it was hard to tell legend from reality. But when I was ten, my dad asked me to make a very serious promise. He asked me to grow up and be a writer. He asked me if I would write the stories of his ancestors and in order to do that, he asked me to find the “truth” of his ancestors. So, since I was ten years old, I’ve been seeking to find out where my daddy came from, where I came from. I can’t write about people unless I know they existed and the hardest trail I’ve had to follow? Joe, the hero of my dad’s story. [Well, there was his great uncle, Henry Rogers, too, but that’s for another blog entry.]

Long after I made that promise, in 2010, my dad had been diagnosed with cancer and given a year to live. My siblings and I were taking turns staying with him and caring for him. I was there one night after dark, sitting beside his old wood stove. Daddy never had heat in his house and he heated his little trailer with a wood stove right up until he was too sick to stay in it. He sat in his favorite chair, a straight wood one with a back that looked like a ladder and a bottom made of hemp that he had put in that chair back in the 1970s. He looked at the pictures lining his walls, photos of his parents and my mom, photos of all his children and grandchildren. Daddy loved his photos. He loved his family. “Sis,” he said. “There’s a story I never told you before. And don’t you never tell this to nobody…” but here I am, about to tell it to my readers because it needs to be told. “Dad,” he continued, “once told me that Great-great-Grandma was living out West and she was raped by an Apache.” He turned back to me and said, “I never told nobody that before. My daddy only mentioned it to me once.” Then he was done. He never said another word about it. I couldn’t put the pieces together. I thought he had his facts wrong. My great-great-grandfather was born in “Old Mexico.” I kept thinking that he always used the word “old” to differentiate between original Mexico and New Mexico. I had found census records, stating he was born in Mexico City and some said “Old Mexico.” Even the newspaper articles I had found said “Old Mexico.” So, how could his mother have been living in Apache Territory? I had spent my life believing that my great-great-grandfather was descended from Aztecs or Mayas or some other Meso-American tribe. I learned everything I could about the Aztecs and Mayas. I learned to speak Spanish and a little Nahuatl. I read books, watched documentaries, constantly searching for clues to the past so that I could write the story that needed to be written.

Any time in my life when someone told me that I didn’t look “Indian” or “Native” I was secretly hurt, because I KNEW my great-great-grandfather WAS [I also knew my paternal grandmother had Cherokee ancestry. She wasn’t some fictitious “princess” or the product of a White wannabe, but that’s also a story for another post.]

I had done some digging and found census records and old newspaper articles about Joe Franklin. I discovered that his name had been Jose’ or Joseph Masilenia or Masinario [depending on the record] Pabilo, Pablis, Pablio [also, depending on the record]. I found his marriage certificate, signed with an X and a witness. His race was listed as White but his records were filed under “Colored.” I remembered a few years earlier that when nurses at the adult day care would ask my Great Uncle Junis about his rich skin tone and lack of hair he would respond that his grandfather was an Indian.

I had some relatives who told me that Joe wasn’t my real great-great-grandfather, that there had been some non-parental events. I hoped that wasn’t true. I realized that anything was possible, but I had grown up admiring this man. I didn’t want my childhood hero taken from me. To me, he was my Tecumseh, my Crazy Horse. He was my great-great-grandpa. Still, I made my dad a promise, that I would find the truth and so I set out to keep it, regardless of how it made me feel. I braced myself. Even IF Joe turned out to not be the start of my paternal grandfather’s line in Kentucky, I would still honor him.

Finally, after talking to a friend about DNA testing, I decided to bite the proverbial bullet and I spat in a tube for AncestryDNA and for 23andMe. I knew that there was a chance I’d get nothing, that all those genes I was looking for might be carried on the Y chromosome, or that Joe’s daughter-in- law may have been promiscuous. That was the rumor, but I took the tests anyway. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Prior to taking the test, I had a wonderful woman from another state contact me. Her name is Susie. Susie had stories to tell me that added to what I already knew and I am forever grateful to her [thank you, Susie]. And before that, there had been Helen Flatt, who taught in the Adair County schools and at Lindsey Wilson College, altogether she taught for more than fifty years. Mrs. Flatt had met Joe when she was a little girl. He had worked for her grandfather. She said he was definitely not from around here. He had brown skin and he spoke with an accent. She, like everyone else, attested that he was from “Old Mexico,” but Joe told his granddaughter, my grandpa’s cousin, that he was not Mexican. Other old timers that I talked to, who had known my grandfather’s family, also attested that he was from “Old Mexico.” He had handed down to my Great-Uncle Junis that he was a Spanish-Indian, which is what my grandfather told my brother. He also told my brother that he witnessed his parent’s murder and his mother’s being raped when he was ten and then the De Haro family took him in and raised him until he was around 13 or 14 at which time he met James Sexton. One of the few kinds of Native DNA that 23andMe can detect, to the best of my understanding, is Pima. I have now discovered a photo of Joe and records indicating that he was actually born in Arizona, not present-day Mexico. At the time of Joe’s birth in 1840, Arizona was still a part of “Old Mexico.” It was common practice for Spanish priests and owners of haciendas to take Pima and Maricopa concubines and sometimes, wives.

Now back to the DNA test, my 23andMe results indicate that I had both a full-blood Native American and a full-blood Iberian ancestor during the early parts of the 1800s, hence, I believe them to have been Joe’s parents. Is this absolute “proof” that Joe was Pima? No.He may have been Papago or Maricopa or even Apache, but the time, place and alliances at the time of his birth do point toward Pima. Was his mother a Pima who was raped by an Apache? I have no idea. Was his father a Spaniard or a Mexican? Who would have taken a ten-year-old boy for a slave then? Again, I have no true facts, only theories. I hope this is an indication that I’m finally on the right trail. When I ran my DNA results through a calculator from Standford University it showed Native DNA, Basque DNA, Spanish DNA and general Mediterranean (including North Africa, Southern France, Italy, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Northern India) and Near Eastern DNA coming from multiple directions, but I DO have a strong Melungeon ancestry, as well. So, that is expected. I also have ancestry from the British Isles, almost half. Now, throw in a little Slavic and West Asian with a pinch of Finnish/Russian and East Asian and you have–ME.

Soooo….why did I do this? What does it prove? I did it because my dad asked me to find the paper trail to his family, for his mother and his father. I did it because I’ve wanted to know since I was a little girl just where my family came from. I did it because in my heart of hearts I’ve always felt that Joe’s courageous story needed to be told. I felt that this boy’s story was the story of many people who lived during that turbulent time, who saw horrible things, but Joe’s wasn’t just a sad story. It’s also a story that shows humanity at both its worst and its best. James Sexton didn’t have to give an orphaned boy from another culture a new home, yet he did. He didn’t have to give him brothers, yet he did. And to show his gratitude, Joe adopted a new name, “Franklin.” It means “free” and it was the middle name of one of James’s sons, Joe’s adopted brother. Franklin–FREE–became a new name for a new life, for a new family, my family. Joe lived a long life after coming here. He met a girl who would become his wife, who would raise a family with him. If not for Jose Masilenia Pabila Franklin I would never have been born. Regardless of the DNA test results, even if it had not indicated that I am likely his descendant, I think I would still call him my great-great-grandfather. I believe his life mattered and I’m so glad he lived.

The legacy of a good person should be kept alive so that those of us who come after can look at that life and know what it means to really live. If we fail to learn from the past, from our ancestors, we are bound to destroy our children. Without yesterday there is no now. Without now, there is no tomorrow. That doesn’t mean we should live in the past, but neither should we let it be buried by mounds of time dust. It was my father’s stories that kept my ancestors alive to me, that made them more than a name on a forgotten sheet of paper. I have heard it said that in some ancient African cultures the most important person in the village was the story-teller. He or she, depending on the tribe, would beat a drum and to the beat of the drum, they would recite the history of their people so that the children never forgot what was valued in life. I do not tell my stories to the beat of the drum but rather to the rhythm of a keyboard, but my purpose is not different than those ancient African storytellers of so long ago or from the Vikings who used to sing of their deeds or the Plains people of America who painted the deeds of their people on skins. If we do not preserve the knowledge of our ancestors, it is lost and in this digital age of disconnection, maybe it is more important than ever to connect to our families, our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents, our children.

We’ve all heard that old saying, “Kids can be cruel.” And it’s absolutely true.

As a teacher, I’ve seen it all from children; you name it, I’ve probably seen some version of it. There’s not much that kids do that can surprise me. I’ve had to hand out my share of discipline in order to keep the classroom functioning. Now before I go on, let me say discipline is not the same as punishment. Punishment is a grown-up’s way of getting back at a kid. It is often harsh and severe. Discipline, however, is redemptive.  It’s meant to help a child understand that there are consequences for our choices. Discipline builds respect, over time. Punishment breeds fear, resentment and rebellion (I think it was Paul who admonished early Christians, “Provoke not your children to wrath.”) Punishment leads to abuse. Discipline leads to understanding, eventually, hopefully…and sometimes, it takes some ingenuity and often words are the strongest tool at our disposal.

This past week I may have administered the best discipline in my entire teaching career. I was at my wits end on how to handle the bickering of some students. We’ve had trouble with some children saying mean and hurtful things to others. I had already talked and taken away privileges, but none of that worked. So, when one little girl told a little boy that he was weird and that everybody hated him (words that crushed his spirit), I got that teacher look on my face, then I closed my classroom door. I shooshed them and stood there with my head slightly bowed and my hands behind my back. I was secretly praying to get through to the kids about how cruel words, criticism and unkindness take a long time to get over, a lifetime. Then I saw a hammer, board and nail in my mind’s eye. I didn’t have those objects for my demo, but I did look up and see a screw in the wall.

I showed them the screw in the wall and asked them what would happen if I took out that screw. Everyone said, “It will leave a hole.”

“That’s right,” I replied. “In the same way, every time we call another person weird or stupid or ugly…every time we say ‘you can’t do anything right,’ or ‘everybody hates you,’ we are making a hole in that person’s heart. Maybe I could fill this hole in with putty but underneath the putty, the scar is still there. When somebody says something mean to you it feels like they put a hole in your life, in your heart, and it never goes away. And pretty soon people are going around putting holes in people because that’s all they know how to do.”

Then I asked them,  “Who in here has ever had someone put a whole in you?” Every hand in the room went up. Every one. And the oldest one is only eight years old. Wow! Our words have such power.  I told them that if they put holes in people with their words then whenever the person they hurt grew up, they would remember them as the person who hurt them. I went on. I told them the poignant story of how someone had said mean things to me when I was their age and how I never forgot those mean things and how every time I thought of some kids I had known then, I always remember that they made holes in my heart with their words.

They sat, 24 first graders, in stone silence. It was remarkable. Some of them had downcast eyes, others near tears. I think they really understood. We ended up having what may have been the best week out of this year. On the way to the playground yesterday, I overheard one little girl say to another one that a thought had crossed her mind but she didn’t say it, because she didn’t want to make holes in people. It was the same little girl who had spoken so unkindly before. I knew she meant it. And I knew that some of those kids would never forget that unkind words are like screws that bore into our lives, leaving scars, and just maybe a few less kids will be cruel.