GOING HOME

I'm going 'home' tomorrow. A place where I spent the most memorable years of my childhood. This visit will be very different. I will look at the mountains, the valleys, the dirt roads and the old houses in a totally different way.This time I will use my imagination to see my ancestors raising their families the way they did in the 1800's and 1900's. I may talk to the mountain folk who have heard stories of my ancestors. I may even find more relatives that I never knew I had.

I am excited...but sad. Sad in the fact that I never will be able to share all of this with my dad. However, when I come back I will be able to share it all with my daughters and my brothers. And...when I come back, I will finish the story of "The Little Green-Eyed Girl".

In My Grandmother's Words.....

"This is a story about me when I was growing up. But it was a lot worse than this. I got beat up so many times and starved and had to wear ragged clothes and shoes."

"The Little Green Eyed Girl was sad and lonely, and torn from the arms of her family. Her mother had just died from child bed fever, after giving birth to the little girl's baby sister. The baby lived but the mother didn't. Now she had two sisters and two brothers, also a half brother and a half sister. She had a daddy that was so very young and didn't know what to do or who to turn to for help. What to do with six little children and one tiny baby only one month old. Someone had to take care of these little ones so daddy could go off to work and try to make a living. A housekeeper was out of the question as no one would take on this job."

"The year was 1932 and the month was the beautiful spring month of May. The little girl was just eight years old. She would turn nine in June. On this beautiful Sunday morning, Mother's Day, they had just buried her mother. The beautiful little girl with the lovely green eyes, and light brown hair whose name was Hazel, wondered what in the world would happen to her and her brothers and sisters. Who could they stay with and she knew they would all go separate ways as no one would take all of them so they could stay together. Hazel May was the eldest of the five children born to her mother Della Mae and her daddy, Beachum. Her next of kin was a brother, David Henry Clay, who was only six. Then came another brother, Thomas Jesse James, who was only four years old. Then a sister, Juanita, who was only two and the baby sister, Anna Ruth who was only a month old. She had an older half sister, Alma, who was married and expecting a child in September and an older half brother, Ray Anderson.

The Little Green Eyed Girl

It has been a year and two months since my dad passed away. During that sad time, I found a cousin that I had never met before. Billie Jo Staveness. A couple of weeks after the funeral, I got a package in the mail from Billie Jo. It was a wealth of information! It was a story that my grandmother had written about her life as a child, her parents, brothers and sisters, her aunts and uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. It was a story about "The Little Green Eyed Girl".

I grew up in Flat Ridge, VA. A place where the sunshine is piped in. A beautiful place on this earth that I loved then and find that I love more and more every day. I thought we lived there just because mom and dad found it and liked it there. I graduated high school, left home and went in the Army and went on with my adult life, never knowing really why I lived in Flat Ridge. It wasn't until I read my grandmother's story that I learned that all of my dad's relatives, (some that I remember), were born in those mountains and died in those mountains. And they are all buried in a little cemetery just a couple of miles where I lived for all of those years.

It is now my goal in life to preserve this information and to gather more and more information so that I can give this gift to my precious daughters. I want them to know the awesome history that I now know and to know who their paw paw really was and where he came from. One way I intend to do this is with this blog. I hope everyone that continues to read this blog will find it as amazing as I have.

I am going to transcribe my grandmothers story in this blog. I am going to write it just as she did. I will pass along her stories as she has passed them on to me.

I love you Vandetta and Candace and I hope you treasure this just as I do.