Myth --Bree Roark
And so, yesterday, like so many Saturdays, I was awake well before even the cats had a chance to come and demand my attention. No light penetrated the windows. My family was still snuggled under the covers, dancing with the very sleep that excused himself from my presence. In fact, I found that sleep had lied outright to me. He hung over the house, playing with the cats, chasing the dogs, holding my family close. I was not happy.
It is impolite to wake up the whole house with the jealous noise of activity, so I did what I always do---I turned on the computer and turned to the company of my ancestors. Lately, I have been caught between the tug and pull of several old souls that are competing for me to paint them into the light of the living once again. I have been obliged to wash the canvas and begin painting the background quite a few times when I find that I must stop to research one small point that leads me down the rabbit hole of discovering entire new branches of information. Consequently, I now had canvas after canvas propped up around the house, calling out to me to hurry up and paint, for heaven's sake.
On this occasion, as I sat before the computer, all things began with my great-grandmother, Laura Wildie Roane Dominick. I had already begun the process of writing my next post, but as seems to be the case in many of my searches as of late, I was looking for an elusive online copy of a marriage certificate. I knew there was a marriage announcement in a 1916 newspaper, so I had been searching newspaper archives with no luck. I had seen it at one point when I was younger---it included a beautiful photo of her in her gauzy veil that I could still vividly picture, and was determined to find it. I searched for a bit, and when I started to feel a bit frustrated, switched over to Facebook. A friend had posted a music video that I thought would be a perfect touch to add to a post on my fifth great-grandfather, Archibald. I played with the lyrics for a bit and thought about how I would intersperse them among the information about his life. Musing for a time over how to incorporate these facts, I switched over to My Heritage and began to roam through the family tree's branches that touched Archibald's life. And then, the rabbit hole opened up and swallowed me whole.
I did, however, have an exciting and interesting ride yesterday morning that took me from old Nashville, Tennessee through the sugar plantations of Texas and back to the roaring twenties of Birmingham, Alabama. I have to thank sleep for eluding my desire to spend time together, because otherwise when my family woke up I would not have been able to greet them with "You are never going to guess what I found..." I love to greet their sleepy morning faces this way. They always stop, laugh, and looks at me like "What now?"
The path I began with yesterday morning begins with my Great-Grandmother Dominick in the lower right-hand corner of this snapshot of the family tree:
As I researched Anne Contesse Irby Roane's family, I found that she was buried with her daughters in Houston, Texas. I knew that James Roane had passed away from exposure the Cholera epidemic that he was working to treat in Nashville, so I figured that she must have followed one of her children to Texas. Sure enough, her daughter, Christiana, had moved to Texas with her husband, and she must have followed. The Texas connection intrigued me. When I visited my sister in Texas this past summer, we dropped in at the Bullock Texas State History Museum, and learned quite a bit about the colonization and Civil War period, so I was curious about what this part of the family experienced when they moved to Texas. I began to research, and discovered that Christiana's sister, Laura, and her brother, Archibald all moved to Texas as well. They lived through the Civil War in Texas, and had an exciting and at times sad story to tell. Their story involves a Texas Senator, sugar plantations, murder, affairs, intrigue, and ultimately the destruction of their livelihood. However, I am going to put their story off to a future post. (This is hard to do because they are practically screaming at me from their canvas to paint their stories, but they will have to simmer for a while. I have bigger fish to fry today.)
When you have a connection to a president in your family, no matter if it is in the surrounding forest or your own tree, you document it. So...I spent some time on Anne's family tree. Her parents were John Irby and Mary Tyler. Mary Tyler's parents were John Chiles Tyler and Anne Contesse. Finally, I knew where her unusual middle name originated---it was her mother's maiden name. (This is a common practice in families with Western European backgrounds, and can be helpful in giving leads when you are researching families.) Mary's brother was no less than President John Tyler, which was pretty interesting, but I had other details I wanted to research. I added him to the tree and focused my attention on Anne Contesse Irby Roane's sister, Frances. Why did her sister matter more to me than spending more time on President Tyler? To be honest, I had a difficult time finding Anne Contesse Irby Roane's relationship to her parents because many people were only including Frances on their online family trees. There were other children in the family besides Frances, but in so many of the trees I searched, they only named her. It seemed odd to me, and intuitively, I decided she must be important. Looking back, I now understand why Frances's lineage was important enough to people that they focused only on her in their trees.
Frances, it turned out married a man named George Washington Morgan. Their child, John Tyler Morgan was a US Senator prior to and following the Civil War. During the Civil War, he enlisted as a private in the Alabama Infantry and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. He later resigned and organized a regiment of rangers which he led as colonel, and was later promoted to brigadier general. His re-election and subsequent confirmation to the Senate, despite a Northern senator's outspoken opposition to a former Confederate officer serving, was astounding. I must editorialize for a moment on his life, as I discovered that he was a strong advocate of white supremacy, which makes my stomach turn. He led serious discussions to deport African Americans and was a strong proponent of Jim Crow laws. I am saddened that this was how he chose to use his time as a state senator and that his legacy is tainted by hatred. I wish that I could reach back through time and change whatever there was in him that caused this hatred. I feel as though it is through his work that many lives were shattered in Alabama, and I find it beyond tragic. The good, the bad and the ugly of my family tree. There it is... Thankfully, I did not stop with John Tyler Morgan and continued to research the family tree because I felt that there was more to the story, and I was right. John Tyler Morgan had a daughter named Musidora whose family hid the gem that left me breathless...
Let me take a moment to give some background on why Musidora's family story is important to me. You can say that I have always been fascinated with literature. I have written stories, poems and character sketches for as long as I could gather a few words together in a sentence. Literature and the creative process have been riding with me either as a book in my hand or a dream in my heart all of my life. As a student in the English department at Appalachian State University, I participated in a study abroad venture that changed my life. Two of my English professors lead a trip that followed the path of expatriate writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, among others. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was a favorite novel of mine. There was something about his descriptions and phrasing that always left me wanting more. I was not only fascinated with his writing style but also with the Fitzgeralds' tumultuous relationships with each other and the world around them. During the trip, I consumed Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, which was Hemingway's candid and often brutal portrayal of his fellow expatriates. He often spoke about the Fitzgeralds and his distaste for Zelda, whom he believed was destroying Fitzgerald. I have since read other accounts of the Fitzgeralds and can say that I feel sad for both of them. Theirs was another whirlwind romance that, when paired with the time's restrictive atmosphere for women and the twin demons of alcoholism and bipolar illness, destroyed the two people it loved the most. Our trip was the stuff of dreams---I enjoyed frequenting the cafes where these men and women sipped café au lait as they sketched out their masterpieces. I walked the streets that they walked, and gazed at sights that their eyes also found splendid. My first husband proposed to me on this trip, and later on our honeymoon, we would find the house that F. Scott and Zelda rented in Alabama and sit beneath its roof---a museum dedicated to their memory. F. Scott and Zelda's romance was intertwined with mine---filled with moments of sunshine, threatening skies, stormy winds and destruction.
But, how does this relate to Musidora and our genealogy adventure? I am getting to that... Musidora's family tree shocked me and left me stunned for a more than a few moments yesterday morning. I double-checked my sources against other sources and was confronted with a true gem hidden in the forest---not in my tree---but the trees that surrounded it, lending shade and protecting it with their branches. This is what I saw:
Musidora's granddaughter was the tortured yet creative writer and painter, Zelda Fitzgerald. Her husband had written my favorite novel, and had, according to her, stolen quotes from her diary to give life to his female characters. When I sat in her former Alabama home twenty-three years ago and chatted with the museum's owner, when I stayed at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville and noted the views that F. Scott Fitzgerald surveyed as he battled his addiction to alcohol, as I sat at Le Sélect in Paris and imagined what it must have been like on the eve of WWII, I was not only thinking of literary greats, I was communing with family. Storytelling, a love of literature, and a fondness for wordplay not only run through the branches, leaves and roots of my tree but also in the forest that surrounds it. You can say a lot about the South's history that is unflattering, violent and at times true, but there is one truth that shines like a beacon through the darkness. We know how to live and tell one hell of a story.
Lessons Learned
Research the ordinary-seeming people you find in your tree. You may have never heard their names before the moment you first pull them up. There may not be any information attached to the record you find about them from another genealogist's shared family tree. However, just like the quiet boy or girl in high school whose behavior, appearance or speech didn't scream "Hey! Look at me," but somehow wound up performing a heroic feat like successfully landing a plane whose power had failed or becoming a leading advocate of civil rights in their community, these ancestors will enrich your life.
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
Happy Hunting,
Catherine
