The Wearing of The Grey

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I've been immersed the last couple of days in my genealogy stuff.

Genealogy is like a big jigsaw puzzle of history, but on a personal level.
You find clues to people by finding someone and leapfrogging around and back to another person.

Like yesterday.
I spent 5 hours, tracing the movement of 4 generations of a family, both moving physically in the world and moving through the changes in the family structure that is brought on by time.

All this tracing and cross referencing of 8 decades of a family's members to try to find where someone in that grouping would cross over into the path of the particular person I wanted to find.
Sometimes if you can't find a person directly, you can locate them in this way.

But it was not to be in this case.

I could look at it as a waste of 5 hours but since I am fascinated by people's lives from the past
and I thoroughly enjoyed myself poking around in their closets, I am ok with it.

Currently I am noodling around in my mother's side of the family.  Her side is the one that has deep roots in America.
By deep I mean pre-Revolutionary times.  Not all but quite a few branches...or should that be roots.lol
And most, if not all are in Virginia.

My roots are country roots, not city roots.  Many of them were planted in south central VA, in the Campbell and Charlotte Counties of the state.  The land of farms and rural life.

Here's a bridge over the Falling River(a branch of the Roanoke River)....

And here's an old mill on the Falling River, called Harper's Mill....

My grandfather was born a Harper.  That grist mill belonged to someone in our Harper family.  Many of the Harpers I am descended from were millers by trade.

I found myself out of one of the limbs on that side of my tree yesterday and I had progressed back to the 1860's era.
1860's as in Civil War.....in the South.
And I have begun to unearth(bad pun)Confederate soldiers in the family.

Due to my ancestors involvement in the Civil War and also how I find myself connected to and how I feel about that whole time in history I have been exploring that era of our nation's history anew.

And I want to say that the teaching of American history to our children is sorely lacking in this country.
The amount of time the school's spent on teaching history was a lot longer during my generation than it is in today's schools.
What my 2 college student kids were taught up to Grade 12 was barely anything compared to what my generation was expected to know.
And I am finding what the last kid I have in high school is being taught is so dumbed down, it's ridiculous.  And he goes to one of the best(credentials of teachers/test scores) public schools in this region!

History is NOT considered important in the schools anymore since knowing/learning it doesn't directly help you find a job when you graduate.  And that's what they concentrate on nowadays in high school.....on teaching to the test and vocational learning.

But it IS still important if you want to be an informed member of society.
You need to know what happened in the past so as to know who you are and how to NOT repeat the mistakes your ancestors made.

And though my generation did indeed spend more time on history as a subject in school, we were focused on all the wrong things.
We were drilled on knowing dates, events, names....the WHOs, WHATs, WHEREs.  Not enough time was spent learning about the WHYs of history.

Why things happened.....like Why the Civil War happened.

The textbooks of my youth were very general in their whys, and some whys where ignored or downright incorrect or just missing.
And as a Southerner I am going to tell you something about all those pages in your history textbooks won't.

That the North, being the victor in That War Between the States, they got to decide on how this era would be recorded and how the history would be written and passed down to future generations.
The names, dates and facts may be correct but the whys are colored and skewed toward the victor's side.  Or pieces of the Whys are totally missing if the 'powers that be' thought those parts would make them look bad to posterity.  While the South had better generals, the North had better SPIN DOCTORS when the war was over. ;-)

The WHYS of history is not so simplistic.
There isn't good or evil.....no black or white.
History is shades of grey at best.

As a Southerner I was/am always made to feel less than, especially when the Civil War came up.
Not just personally by folks I've met from "Up North" when I was a kid, but from the textbooks in my school down to films, songs, books and other aspects of our national culture.
Being a Northerner was good, being a Southerner was bad.  The South had slavery so that made us evil.
I guess it's easier just to label us the bad guys and ignore the complicity of the North in that whole economic system.  It's easier to think yourself superior to someone else and look down upon them.

Not to start a new war here but there are many folks out there who harbor many misguided notions about the South.
About who we are/were.....about our history.
And just because "we" like a certain flag and song, it doesn't make "us" racists.
It's been almost 147 years since the war ended and I still find myself having to fight the battle some days when I hear some ignorant opinion fly out of someone's mouth up here in Yankeeland.

Being from the South is complicated.

Events going back to the Tariff Act of 1828(bonus points if you even know what this was)have changed the course of our nation's history.
And until this country can have an intelligent dialogue about how the South was treated since before the founding of the first colonies through today, we are doomed to relive and repeat the past.

Sluggy-Proud daughter of Virginia