Dixieland

where all of them were living – was one tenth that number. Our daughters could have had 512 grandmothers and grandfathers on this side of the Atlantic by then; and they certainly had thousands of cousins.

There are approximately 150 ancestral families presented in this book, which on average traces most of the families back at Oh, I love those hills of Old Virginia,

least to 1700. That there should have been 2,000 grandfathers and grandmothers alive at that time (on my wife’s side only) makes In those Blue Ridge hills I did roam.

the 150 seem like an insignificant number – which it well could be – except that most Americans today most likely cannot go back When I die, won’t you bury me on the mountain,

further than their great grandparents.

Far away, near my Blue Ridge mountain home.

Perhaps I could have found some more, but, quite frankly, I am exhausted.

(F

Besides, there were never 2,000.

latt anD ScruggS)

Cousins continued to marry descendants of the same ancestors or their cousins– not because incest was widely popular, but because the rural locations were much of the American population was harbored was occupied by a limited number of extended families. Yet there was MORE diversity in those days than there was to be in the places these ancestors lived 100 years later – after they had further intermarried.

The collection flask which had taken in all comers at their first arrivals, now had a funner attached to it which was getting narrower by the time of the Revolution– so narrow, in fact, that by 1800, it had become a straw as the stream of emigrants out of Virginia and into Kentucky were by that time all closely related. What should be surprising here is not that the later generations were so interrelated, but that the earlier generations were so not. German, English, French, Welsh, German, Danish, Scots, Irish, and American Indian had rarely come into such close contact in the Old World, but in the New World it took only 150 years before they had melded into a fairly homogeneous lot.

These were the people who crossed the Appalachians and settled Kentucky. When the outside “rediscovered” the hillbillies in the early 20th century, they made them seem little more than a “snapshot” people: frozen in time, living where they had always lived, marrying generation after generation to the equivalent of their sisters. The records in this book suggest the opposite.

Hillbillies had been “rediscovered” after barely 100 years – 4 generations at most. The people they intermarried with before they had come into the mountains had been more diverse – a collection of English, Irish, Scots, French, German, Danish, and Native American – than had any of these groups in Europe individually.

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