Rooting around

For the Labor Day weekend, we went up to the mountains to stay with Mike's extended family. Rare in America are families that are still mostly in one area, but most all of Mike's aunts, uncles and cousins are from and still living in Mitchell County, North Carolina. Trying to find my way through the family stories that are a necessary part of family visits, I started to chart who all were these fabulous characters of Mike's heritage and how they were related. I am lousy with verbal information and needed to visualize the links of parentage, and guess what, all of a sudden I got sucked into genealogy. Since coming home, I have thrown myself wholeheartedly into charting Mike's roots.
I had first ventured into genealogical research ten years ago for my own kin, making use of the elderly people who were keen to share their memories as they felt the chill of death on the nape of their necks (their words). Since then the tools of the trade have really developed, wow the web! Yay Mormons!
And what I've found so far is that Mike's father's kin, like mine on my father's side, were solidly rural people who prefered to make their own rules and be left alone. The stories emerging from the data are of rugged self-sufficient folks who lived by their hands and their wits. And they were part of Mitchell county from the earliest times, scattered in the drabs of information are ranks from the Revolutionary War, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and so on, plus some personal wars thrown in. Names are bastardized over and over, taking on characteristically local inflections. A suivre...