Well, here's an example. In 4 parts, here is the central story of the Regan family's collective memory - the one that pops up most often and is remembered most vividly. The first part of the story comes from records and family legend, the last from living memory and observation - the middle two from an ambiguous blur of memory and second- or third-hand tales. Sometimes different storytellers contradicted each other, or explained they were fuzzy on details. And then I added a bit... I think this all happened. But I wouldn't call it nonfiction, or history. Call it what it is: a story.
How the Regans Came to America
Once upon a time there was a man named Richard Regan, who lived in the green hills of Ireland, and decided it was time to cross the ocean and start his life anew. He moved to the new colonies in America to settle down on a patch of land he could call his own, in the area they called North Carolina, arriving to the New World just in time to take up arms and fight in the Revolutionary War. Soon after the war was over, just as the Constitution was being written up by important men a little farther north, Richard and his wife, Catherine, had a son, Robinson, and a daughter, Olive.
Fourteen years after Robinson was born, Richard packed the family up to move to Georgia, where new lands had just been carved out from the Seminole Indians and split up into lots of red-clay soil and acres of virgin timber. He'd brought from Ireland the inherited knowledge of a long tradition of sheepherding, and started building up a herd of free-roaming sheep, grazing beneath the pine trees. His wool production, plus the food he and Catherine raised on their small patch of land, was enough to support their small family. Of course, every now and again they had to run into the swamps to hide from the last remaining Seminoles, who rode around seeking vengeance for the theft of all their lands, but hey, that was a typical occupational hazard.
Robinson Regan grew up into a man in Georgia, and met a young woman about his age, by the name of Elizabeth Brown. She was the daughter of Jesse Brown, who had moved from England and who, like Robinson's father, had fought in the Revolutionary War. Jesse Brown and his wife, Delilah, were a prosperous couple, and when Jesse died he owned land, cattle, a house, and several slaves. Jesse had done well for himself in his new life, and his children's children would later be prominent landowners and businessmen; the Regans owned half of Early and Miller counties, and the Mosely name can still be found across southern Georgia on storefronts and doctor's offices. But while the Brown sisters, as much as Mr. Mosely and Mr. Regan, helped found these twin dynasties, and while Jesse Brown's wealth may well have been the kernel of these countless fortunes, the Brown name was lost to family history - save for some Mosely and Regan boys named "Brown," out of a family tradition whose origins nobody remembers. Such is the misfortune of having daughters.
Jesse Brown left a third of his cattle herd to his daughter, and another third to his son-in-law, but although Robinson Regan had married well and inherited much, his family was not rich. Maybe he just had too many children. While their parents each had only two, Robinson and Elizabeth had ten children, and that's ten children that survived into adulthood, mind you. When theiur land and money was divided up - in true Irish tradition, split up among all the children, instead of just passed to the oldest son - there wasn't quite enough to go around. So the Regan children carried on as subsistence farmers - prosperous some years, not-so-prosperous other years. They were landowners but never plantation-founders, usually poor but rarely impoverished, occasionally well-off but never rich.
Never rich, that is, until William Brown Regan came along.
No comments:
Post a Comment