Roots

I went searching for my roots shortly after my son was born.  I figured if he started asking questions like I did as a child, I wanted to give him answers other than the “I don’t know” ones I always got.

The more I started digging, the more addicted I became. I found it fascinating uncovering tidbits of lives that pieced together untold parts of our family history.  There’s been more than a few surprises along the way.

One cousin on my mother’s side interviewed my Norwegian great-grandmother shortly before she died. When asked the name of her grandparents, she didn’t know, because they stayed behind in Norway when her parents immigrated.  She said, “Some people say that Ma and Pa were related, but that’s just a bunch of hogwash.”  I discovered it to be true.  Her parents were first cousins, once removed.  Good thing she didn’t live long enough to have that fact revealed.

When I got armed with a few more juicy pieces of information, like the fact that that same great grandmother had a child with another man before she married my great grandfather, I went to visit a great uncle to see if he could verify the information.  He’d never heard it before, but said it made sense to him, based on things his father raged about when he was drunk.  He advised me against further research and told me that he’d lived just fine all his 77 years without knowing anything about the past, and it was best kept in the past.  The fact he had an older brother he’d never met, didn’t affect him one bit.

My hillbilly grandmother told me her mother was an orphan because her mother’s mother died in childbirth and her mother’s father was killed by vigilantes in Southern Missouri in the days following the Civil War.  It wasn’t until after grandma died that I found her story to be almost true.  As it turns out, my great-great grandfather, Jasper N. McKinney, wasn’t killed by vigilantes, he was killed because he was the leader of a vigilante group.  He was found face down in the White River with his hands tied behind his back.  There was an inquest into his death and it was determined he died from “unknown trauma to the neck.” To this day, I don’t know if my grandmother was lied to about that little fact, or she lied to me to hide her embarrassment that her grandfather was a bad guy.

When I sent this bit of information off to my dad’s cousins in Missouri, he called me up immediately and wasn’t at all happy with the truth. “Well Darlin’,” he said, “you got some wrong information here.  We come from law abidin’, upstandin’ citizens.”  I can prove otherwise, but now I’m realizing why some people just leave the past alone. 

My son may not like the answers I give him someday, but at least I’ll never say, “I don’t know.”  Maybe now, I know too much.