I got a call from Dah Mama to come right over--Second cousin Bertie Jane and her husband had dropped in all the way from North Carolina and they wanted to finally meet me.WHO????
If you aren't from a Southern Family I'm not sure if you can fully appreciate what it means to sit down with total strangers and begin untangling the family tree until you've proved that everyone is, indeed, related.
This was a short session as such episodes go--the Ground Zero Relation was finally pinpointed and confirmed after a mere 3 hours. In this case, it's my great-great-grandfather, James Richard Rider. Whew!
Once the degrees of relation had been worked out we then had to go over every new addition to everyone's immediate families for the last 3 generations--and the pedigrees of those who had "married in." I gained an insight into the Old Testament--the women were the ones who remembered all the begats and were telling the men what to write down!
The biggest faux pas occurred when it was discovered Mr. T and I had lived within 70 miles of Second Cousin Bertie Jane back in 1974 when we lived in Durham. To make matters worse, we had actually driven within one mile of their house and not stopped. Of course I didn't know about the existence of this Second Cousin but I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BECAUSE THIS COUSIN WAS NAMED FOR MY GREAT GRANDMOTHER ALBERTA (BERTIE) WHO IN TURN HAD NAMED MY GRANDMOTHER 'BERTIE.' Family feuds have begun over less.
Mind you, we covered 7 generations of relations--omitting the Yankee branches of the family tree who had changed their names in a tiff with the rest of the family who had gone Gray. It was a monumental undertaking but finally accomplished to everyone's satisfaction.
It all reminded me of the title of a favorite Southern cookbook:
Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make A Roux? (Book 1): A Cajun / Creole Family Album Cookbook (Jan 1, 2006) by Marcelle Bienvenu
1 comment:
I love Yankees.
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