What does ancestry have to do with travel and lifestyle blogging? It’s pretty simple. First, I am, admittedly, a huge history and art nerd. I love reading and am obsessed with libraries; I also happen to love to research, to visit historical sites, museums, watch documentaries, explore…give it ALL to me! Second, as I dive further into my research, there will be, and has already been, a degree of travel and adventure woven into the experience. It was actually a friend of mine who first suggested the idea of coupling my future trips with my ancestral research needs and to incorporate various aspects of that location into my travel blogs. Sounds like a win-win situation, right? The concept of intertwining two of my different niches was appealing, to say the least. I instantly felt like we were on to something good.
My research first started in my late teens, though I was too cheap to pay for the access to the records I needed at the time. Truth be told, I thought that I was American Indian and was hoping it would score me scholarship opportunities. For most of my life I proudly believed that my father was a large part Cherokee Indian and I would be lying if I said my great-grandfather didn’t appear to be a rather convincing Indian descendant to support this theory. My father’s family, on his paternal side, is from a small town in southwestern Virginia; so far west that it is smack in-between the most eastern tip of Tennessee and the southernmost point of West Virginia. Tazewell is located in Smyth County, tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains, also called the Great Smoky Mountains, or Smokies for short. The area is known for having a history of previously being heavily occupied by Indian tribes There are even stories of a fiddle my ancestor played for the Indian tribes and that he was accepted by them when he traveled down from colonial New York in the 1700’s. Fiddlin’ John Totten is what they called him and, as I understand it, the fiddle is still in the family to this day. He was the suspected ancestor who would have swooped our story’s Pocahontas off her feet and rode off into the sunset. It was even rumored that the Indians taught him how to farm, which became my family’s trade for several hundred years to follow. Some of this may be true, but I have come to learn that not all the family history, as it has been presented, is accurate.
As it turns out, we are not American Indian, not even in the slightest amount, despite the convincing “evidence”. Surprise! Family lore has been making research all the more interesting and challenging at the same time. One of my father’s cousins was the first to discover the cold truth and no one wanted to believe her, not even me. She had a DNA test done through Ancestry.com and nowhere on her results were there even trace amounts of Native American DNA. Burst that bubble quickly, especially when my results showed the same lack of genetic evidence to a culture we held on to for… I honestly don’t even know how many generations. I quickly started maneuvering through my family tree to get to the ancestor, John, that we suspected our cherished American Indian heritage was connected through, only to confirm what I already now knew was the truth. This was my welcome into the wild world of family ancestry.
So again, what does this have to do with travel? Just to give you an example, I have been through the previously mentioned Smokies and felt the most incredible and compelling sensation of knowing where I was before the signs began to populate. No, I didn’t cheat with navigation and fortunately I have two different friends who witnessed this on two separate occasions. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe it was something like genetic memory (we will save that for another day), maybe it was just a hunch…I don’t know. Regardless, what I do know is that I need to further explore the area, as well as examine some of the documents held in the town records in order to complete and verify some of the connections I’ve made. You can rest assured that I will absolutely pair that trip with hiking adventure too. Particularly considering the Great Smoky Mountain National Park is conveniently close by and just happened to be the most visited national park in the U.S.
While it was fairly simple to squash the folklore surrounding my families suspected Indian heritage, other challenges have since presented themselves. I was able to trace that same family line all the way back to the mid 1600’s and am currently trying to connect my way back to London, England with the ancestors I believe immigrated here, specifically to Long Island, New York. This will be a challenge considering when you research both Long Island and London at those exact times, you will find that both areas sustained devastating fires where many of the oldest records were destroyed. This doesn’t mean that I have reached a dead end quite yet; however, it will make finding and piecing together bits of key information more difficult than it already is. Good thing I love a challenge. I imagine that my research will likewise take me to St. Louis, Ireland, and the Czech Republic all within the next couple years.
Most recently, I took a trip to Utah and had a unique opportunity to visit the Family History Library, one of the biggest collections in the world! I an currently working on a piece about that trip and the different avenues I use to conduct my research. Make sure you subscribe here so I can shoot you an email when that blog is posted!
From my journey to yours,
BRILLIANTLY BOHEMIAN 