Our ancestor stories tell us about us

I find it strange how some folks don’t know or care about their ancestors … what they did, how they lived, what they accomplished. I think that’s just sad.

When I think about “my people” who lived long ago, I believe we honor them by knowing a bit about them.

I learned a lot about some of my ancestors from my father’s mother, my grandma, a great storyteller.

Grandma was one of seven children of an iron ore mining company superintendent and his bride.

Grandma was from the Appalachian Mountains in western Virginia near the West Virginia border.

Grandma was a cigarette-smoking, Bible-quoting, stern yet fun Virginia mountain “girl.”

My folks shipped me off to live with my grandparents for my last couple of years of high school. That’s how I came to hear Grandma’s tales.

Grandma would sit in her easy chair smoking her filter-less cigarette, watching her soap operas and offering up tales and opinions.

“You’ve got a double cowlick on your head, boy. You’re going to be bald when you’re grown,” she said once.

She was absolutely right.

My Grandma also believed that the wild weather she saw in her last years was because of the rockets we sent into space.

“We’re poking holes in the sky,” she would say.

Grandma talked about meeting my grandfather when he came to work as a bookkeeper for the mine. She said when she saw him she knew she was going to marry him.

They were married Christmas Day 1912.

After the ceremony they dashed out the door and hopped in their one-horse buggy.

Somewhere in the rush of things my grandfather dropped the reins, and the horse took off with them in their buggy.

“I yelled and yelled at him all the way down the road,” Grandma said.

My grandma yelled at my granddaddy a lot; it might’ve been where I got the notion in my early years that yelling at each other a lot is a perfectly normal part of marriage.

Well, that and my mom and dad often had “brisk discussions” as I say euphemistically.

Grandma told stories of life in a mining town in the 1910s, how “the meanest man in the county,” a fellow named J. I. Jones, met his death in 1913.

“Word was Jones killed two men. The son of one of the men waited in a tree at Jones’ place and when Jones came home he got gunned down,” Grandma said.

Grandma told the story of the time that she and my granddaddy were out for a leisurely afternoon rowboat ride on the nearby river and as they rounded a bend, saw a man beaten and robbed on the shore.

She told of the time a town character named “Turnip” was brought to court for being drunk in public.

“That’ll be 30 days or 30 dollars,” the judge said to Turnip.

“Well Judge, I ain’t got no money. And you know what they say about gettin’ blood out of a turnip,” Turnip said.

“Well we’re just going to have to put ol’ Turnip in jail,” the judge said.

My grandmother liked that story. It made her laugh.

I believe it’s good to know about our ancestors through stories passed on through the years.

Their journeys are part of how we got here.

Grant McGee writes for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him:

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