HISTORY - LOST, IGNORED, or JUST PLAIN HIDDEN

 I came across a message from Henry Louis Gates Jr. regarding his newest PBS project, "The African Americans..Many Rivers to Cross," recently. In the message was a request for input from African American families regarding their interest in our history.  Those  that know me know that many years ago I started researching my personal family history, an interest that was created by my mother's father as he sat in his rocking chair in  front of the fireplace..in our West Virginia home. To me , the child that sat with closed mouth and open ears - the stories he told were simply that .."Grampa's stories." Only later  as an adult, as a parent, as a newly minted  grandparent, would I recognize that these "stories" were the ripe kernel of history as it directly impacts a family and its development over the years.  Those stories were the connecting point which joined the history of these United  States with the individuals who made up my FAMILY. Only in this realization did HISTORY become alive for me...it was no longer the dry facts chronicled (truthfully or untruthfully) in a textbook.

As a writer, I am NOT primarily a historian The facts of what I write are handed down by my elders and they are not colored by the brush of "propriety."  My brother (the historian) would often omit and or ignore certain occurrences because of :propriety...his or some one else's. Historians are prone to that error...if the fact is not socially or politically correct...ignore it or probably edit  it.  Thus what textbooks tend to say about some of the darker moments in our country's times has been "cleaned up" or sanitized for the sake of "appropriateness."  Journalists (reporters)  retell  what they see or experience, editorialists react to events and most  people don't know the difference.  Historians tend to blend the roles without clearly defining the viewpoint.   As a writer (storyteller)I mix the method of telling the story with the facts because my goal is to provide a hook for my  listener to remember the reality of the occurrence. As I tell my story...the facts are as I heard and or experienced them...the characters may be blended.

The "rivers" are symbolic of many things....rivers, mountains, oceans, time spans, social attitudes and prejudices, religious beliefs and convictions.  The first documented ancestor in my knowledge of family arrived on these shores in the 1700's. He was a Quaker anxious to leave the old World (England) for the freedom to worship as he chose.  Another ancestor (a Catholic)  headed westward to the Greater Ohio Valley again for the freedom to worship as he chose.  Another set of ancestors fled across the mountains for the freedom to marry and raise a family with the person they chose. Over the next 200 years..the lifeblood of all three sets of ancestors merged into one bloodline..a portion of the DNA mix  of .one family.   Am I interested in connecting the ancestral lines further back...to the African motherland. Absolutely! The probabilities/possibilities  are mind boggling and this inquiring mind wants to know!