A trial introduction in Ch. 3 of a collection of "glimpses" of kinfolks I discovered in the archives. It's very personal because the book is very personal as well as historical.

[This is the happy innocent discovery time, before I saw I had to do Racial Reckonings]

    Family genealogists, I found, had been swift to begin exchanging information online, and many self-trained volunteers turned semi-professional researchers were at work from the start of the 21^st century, if not earlier. Early in the 2000s there was riches running wild already on the Internet--too wild at times still, based on wishful thinking like much of the recent ThruLines on Ancestry.com, a dubious addition to a worthy site which frequently includes rare documents posted by generous amateur users but also highlights many hasty guesses. Ancestry.com also puts much information behind “Private” labels (the message is ‘email me and beg”) when the whole point of genealogical research ought to be showing and telling.

         Initially confused by wishful thinking that passed as genealogical fact (and even now having to ignore persistent confusion online, one Nabors merging with neighboring Nabors), I slowly learned to draw on my Melville skepticism and to winnow hundreds of documents, then as years passed thousands of documents, in order to identify some of my ancestors and other kinfolks on this continent, many who had come in the 1600s. At first, knowing I would be interrupted by work on Melville, I determined not to join any genealogical sites I had to pay for (how often would I use them in a year?) and to order copies of documents from archives only when I could get something promising no other way. Depression Okies are cheap; I still cut toothpaste tubes apart so as not to waste any. Gradually I had to pay for newspaper access which I could not get for free and to join sites such as Ancestry.com.

         What I found was in the first years was fragmentary, to be sure, even from the increasingly magnificent resources of the Internet. For every 10^th great grandfather I identified, there were 4,095 10^th great grandfathers very few of whom I could ever name. In fact, 4,095 was far too large: any 10^th great grandfather was likely a progenitor several times over. In recent generations, I discovered, I had the North Carolina Scot Robert Ewart as 4^th Great Grandfather twice. I delighted in fancying that I was empowered by that double infusion, for he had been, I learned, a Committee of Safety man in 1775, and father-in-law of a little band of King’s Mountain heroes. Another Scot, John Glenn, of Renfrewshire, was from the same clan as the astronaut, the DNA shows. My Glenn, I learned, fathered many half-Choctaw children as my 5^th Great Grandfather, but he was also my 4^th Great Grandfather, because a Mexican War soldier in southwestern Missouri, one story goes, would not take in a female cousin fleeing Civil War bushwhackers in Arkansas unless she married him. It’s possible I got my height (unusual in the 1950s) from old John Glenn, for his grandsons were exceptionally tall. My Jack Glenn was measured 6’ 5” in the Mexican War and his brother George at 6’ 4”. Did their cousin Sam in Kerrville, Texas, really shoot down hanging business signs he hit his head on? I remember from 1942 the extremely tall ancient Great Great Great Uncle Johnny Glenn who wore all black and a black top hat when he brought my stranded mother little baskets of new Spring vegetables. The more stories I learned after 2002, the more I loved these people as I rejoiced in their characters and tried to see their traits in their living descendants.

         What I wanted was American stories, but any Okie high-school dropout like me would have fantasized about kinship to Scottish and English royalty. When I learned about actual remote royal kinship I was an old man, so any such connection was more amusing than exalting.  Because I have loved Hotspur since 1953, I delighted in learning that Owen Glendower, pompous and long-winded in Shakespeare, was my 17^th Great Grandfather. I have more than one blood tie to Henry VIII, but the fun is in being from a family even more disreputable than the Tudors, the Boleyns, Sir William Boleyn, High Sheriff of Kent, being my 13^th Great Grandfather. (That sounds closer than it is, for there were 30-some thousands of 13^th Great Grandfathers.) Being a Boleyn means I am 2^nd cousin to the first Elizabeth, a few times removed, besides the kinship through her father. Even better for a scholar of literature, having read and loved Emma during the 1959 Christmas break at Northwestern (with no thought of studying the author or plagiarizing anything from her life or her plots or characters), it’s fun to be a blood cousin of Jane Austen, through Thomas Leigh, the mayor of London at Elizabeth’s coronation. (Her sister Cassandra rejoiced in that connection to Sir Thomas long before I did.) I was happy to learn that another direct ancestor might have been, really, the very man who stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum in the nursery rhyme, but I was old and did not want to dig back for shards of ancient glory to bedeck myself with. Still, who could resist learning of descent from the Bruce (something most Scots can do)? And I smile whenever I think of being 6^th cousin to Rob Roy. A suspicious amateur, I had hooted dismissively at the McGehees who claimed that the Mackayhee who arrived in Virginia in the 1600s was really a McGregor but unable to use his name because King James had set out to destroy all living members of the family and to obliterate the name. Ho, ho, I thought, a fantasy of Americans wanting British connections. The Maryland Magruders, I knew, had written at least one whole book proving that they were high and mighty McGregors. No, they weren’t, but we McGehees were, DNA shows.

         In fact, if any Southerner in a family got to Virginia in the 1600s any descendants are going to be kin to many millions of Americans. That will include many of the most notorious bootleggers, western outlaws, and a scary number of modern serial killers. In Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck dropped names of famous Kentucky-West Virginia feuding families, having Turnbull say he had Hatfield blood and threatening to shoot Tom Joad when he got out of prison, and Grampa Joad sending word to Turnbull, “‘Don’t mess around with no Joad. Maybe I got McCoy blood for all I know.’” In fact, I have McCoy blood myself, and Hatfield blood, not much of either. I can’t say that “it so happens that I am kin to both the Hatfields and McCoys.” This is not a matter of “so happening.” It’s a matter of white Southerners (those who have been on this continent since the 1600s) being kin, it seems, to almost everyone who has been around a while. As my double or triple cousin Lois Gore says, if you are Southern you are either kin or connected. And even if one brother went to Virginia another might have landed in Boston--a possibility I flee from rather than pursuing.

         By the late 2010s I had a massive folder called “Ornery People” and a shorter, 10,000 document folder called Glimpses--consisting of page or so captures of kinfolks during revealing--indeed, fascinating--moments in their lives and (often) of American history, usually in some of their own words (even from the 1600s and 1700s). I had accumulated documents in random order and at odd intervals, without focusing sharply on them. Because I am (intermittently) persistent, I found genuinely remarkable documents. When you don’t know family history and family stories, you respond with joy, and even love, at new stories. Ancestors become real. Recently I could find only one 1759 newspaper story on Indian raid on the Catawba river area, but it featured my first cousin Martin Dellinger, who had the wit to lie down in his rye field, out of sight. (A modern cousin, the author of From Yale to Jail, knew nothing about Martin or his own heroic Revolutionary North Carolina ancestors: he took pride in his unremarkable Boston ancestors.) Since I wrote the previous sentence, Cousin David has come back to life in the splendid movie about the trial of the Chicago 7. In an 1844 newspaper I found three or four precious lines about double grandfather Robert Ewart who died in 1781. “During the war Maj. John Davidson and Robt. Ewart (a good Whig) very frequently came to my father’s, Jacob Forney, sen., to consult in favor of the Whig cause--Robert Ewart lived about one and a half miles from Maj. Davison and five and a half miles from my fathers.” Old Jacob Forney’s property was devastated when occupied by Lord Cornwallis and his army in 1781 during a pause on his way to Yorktown. This letter by his son Abraham, in 1844 in his 85^th year, struck me as a miraculous gift. You really have to be a hunter to find such nuggets! My cousin Frederick Slimp, a Union man, wrote much of the History of the Thirteenth Regiment Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry (which includes a photograph of him). Then (looking for other cousins) I found a letter from Boone, North Carolina, in the Lenoir Tropic for 21 October 1885, about a visit to Tennessee: “Fred Slimp I had not seen for 22 years; looked old and broken. We were school boys together. Fred could outrun us all at school in playing ball, base, &c.” [Sic: “base, ball”] You cherish such surprise revelations, even if they are disturbing.  

         Internet genealogical work now may be (as is casually reported) almost as popular as gardening or pornography. Many other Americans have done searches such as I did and have visited more graveyards and court-houses. I made only one cemetery tour, in 2007. I recognize that truly industrious researchers start earlier and go wider and deeper than I do. I have not belatedly dedicated my life to study of my ancestors the way I dedicated my life to Melville research. In fact I continued to write books and many articles on Melville until 2019, when my Library of America Complete Poems appeared, but I have persisted to look for my family at stolen moments for two decades.

         I found my stories about kinfolks in history books; exploration books; wills; land transfers; county records; early military records (the War of Jenkins’ ear, the French and Indian War and Lord Dunmore’s War); many dozens of Revolutionary pension applications from aged patriots; military records for all wars up through World War I; other governmental records; a few family letters in county libraries (one to a grandfather of mine about the Cousin Milton of my chapter 10, although I paid that librarian for several blank pages) and many in college or university collections; dozens of C. S. Turnbo stories about the Cokers lovingly and intelligently available online from Springfield-Greene Library, Missouri library--the magnificent Turnbo being the Studs Terkel of 19^th century Arkansas); the Mexican captivity book written by a Texas cousin; dozens of legal affidavits from relatives in the archives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; hundreds of censuses; many hundreds, perhaps 3,000 or perhaps 5,000, of articles from newspapers in four centuries, starting before the Revolution; WPA interviews; hundreds of Fold3 items; and hundreds of Find-A-Grave photographs of tombstones and other information. My step-GGGG Grandfather William Cocke, who labored to create the State of Franklin, published speeches in newspapers and wrote extant letters to Jefferson and Jackson. Several of my cousins gave speeches which are preserved; several were interviewed in famous books (such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s account of an early Arkansas Coker in his London 1821 Journal of a Tour); several cousins contributed to books (notably Frederick Slimp); several wrote personal accounts such as John F. Hill description of his escape from a Confederate prison; Carrol Moore wrote powerfully about the North Carolina Bushwhacker murderers who got pensioned and protected as Union fighters; a Sims cousin (the Milton I mentioned) wrote eloquent paragraphs about his imprisonment in the Civil War in issues of Confederate Veteran. Men and some women (Aunt Margaret Adams, Grandma Abigail Rogers) performed feats of astonishing bravery; young Stephen F. Sparks and a friend bit down on ropes and swam across the Buffalo Bayou twenty-one times towing Sam Houston’s baggage just before the battle at San Jacinto. I bring to all this research what I have learned (on the fly) about historical research in a scholarly career spanning a decade more than half a century.

         This book may, after all, be a unique genealogical and historical product even though the idea behind it is not that my history is unique--it’s just it may be the first of its kind. Any Depression Okie, anyone whose family had been in Indian Territory since the mid to late 19^th century, could now (like my neighbors in the 1940s, such as the Heflins) create a comparable family archive. (Truly comparable: they had a multi-term Senator as well as a famous actor cousin and the Melvillean Wilson Heflin, whose posthumous Herman Melville’s Whaling Years I enriched with a unique lost typescript and then wrote my most eloquent blurb for.) With the Internet any Okie can retrieve lost family stories and establish new historical memories in the context of successive episodes of American history. I and others like me can understand just who the Joads would have been, the history they would have had, whether they knew it or not.

         The following stories are just samples of hundreds. When I found them, I was still focused on Melville but I was fascinated as I found stories of determination, daring, and endurance. I took private pleasure and derived strength from fancying that I had inherited traits from people I was learning about. I read about these cousins with delight and sometimes awe. What extraordinary people, and what lives they led!