Genealogical research can be a lonely business. It's certainly more often than not a solo venture, a private and personal affair. We may share the fruits of our labor with others in an effort to convey the thrill of discovery, but the actual work itself is usually done alone. But it doesn't always have to be that way. Over the past year and a half, I've been running a collective genealogical and historical project that I thought I would share with people here as a way of suggesting possibilities for group research.
First, I should tell you a little about the place I'm from, since that place itself is the primary focus of this research. I'm from Blackberry Creek, Kentucky, which is officially known as Ransom, Kentucky. Blackberry Creek was settled about 1816 by brothers Joseph and Valentine Hatfield, and Ferrell Evans, the brother of Joseph's wife Martha Evans. They were joined in the 1820s by younger brothers George and Jeremiah Hatfield (note: Jeremiah was the grandfather of Sid Hatfield, the sheriff of Matewan during the West Virginia mine wars of the 1920s) and father Ephraim Hatfield. In the 1830s, Valentine moved his large family across the river to West Virginia. Valentine was the grandfather of Devil Anse Hatfield. My own family, many of whom still live on Blackberry Creek, are descendants of Joseph Hatfield. The descendents of the three Hatfield brothers who remained in Kentucky eventually bought, settled and farmed almost all of Blackberry Creek, and to this day almost every person who lives or has ever lived on Blackberry Creek is in one way or another a descendant of one or another of these three Hatfields.
In later years other families moved into the area and intermarried with the Hatfields - Smith and Runyon and Farley and Dotson and Stafford and Whitt and Canada (originally Kennedy before the local accent wore the name down and transformed it). The lines of connection between these families is intricate, wildly complex, and nothing like the stereotype of the inbred hillbilly. It does produce a situation where every person who grows up on Blackberry Creek is related to every other person who lives there in half a dozen different ways. And in that kind of situation, tracing family roots, knowing who's related to whom, is not just a hobby, it's an absolute necessity! (As a side note, even in the 1800s, marriage between first cousins was extremely uncommon and fairly taboo, though it did happen from time to time - the most well known case being the marriage of first cousins Randall McCoy and Sally McCoy. Marriage between first cousins was pretty much non-existent by the time I came along. Marriages between second cousins happened from time to time, but not often. Typically, the young couple had to be at least third cousins for the family relationship to be without meaning).
One other thing worth mentioning about the area is that it's always been too small, in terms of available land, and too poor, in terms of jobs, for everyone to stay there. While families are very close, the economics of the creek has always meant that many children of many families have always had to leave the area. In the 1940s, people left for Detroit and Cleveland, to work in the auto factories. In the 1950s, when times were better, many of them came home. In the 1960s, when my own parents married, there was a mass exodus of young people to High Point, North Carolina for work in the textile/furniture plants and to places like Piqua, Ohio. In the 1970s when coal mining was booming, many people (such as my parents) came home. Then in the 1980s, when I was in high school, more young people than ever (thanks to good union mining jobs and good Democratic programs, were able to leave the area to pursue college educations and careers outside of Appalachia. So we are as a rule tightly connected with our families to the point of clannishness, all inter-related, and yet increasingly dispersed geographically.
Enter Facebook! A little over a year and a half ago, I created a Facebook page for my little hometown - Blackberry Creek, Kentucky. I posted a few old pictures of my great grandparents, started a few conversational threads, and then, somehow, in ways that I never expected, the site blossomed. It actually sort of exploded into life, as more and more people joined, and their friends and family joined, and their friends and family, and so on. People started posting pictures, old ones, and since we're all related nearly every photo had someone who was an ancestor of everyone else on the site. Word went out, and the next thing I knew I had people joining Facebook just to join my site! People started sharing their genealogical work, documents, more and more photos, stories about this person or that, this family or that, posting links to other information on the web, making connections, calling in more friends. At the moment, I have almost 600 members who have collectively posted over 1300 old family photos. The excitement as people see photos of their own great grandparents, family photos that they had never seen before or even knew existed, is palpable, heartwarming.
One of the things I love most about the site is the way we are recovering our own family histories. There were so few photos from the 1800s and early 1900s and, as one generation died, those would get divided among the children, and then divided again, until each individual family might have at most one or two old photos to pass down. But now, through the site, we have been able to bring these family photos together and make them available for everyone.
Another thing that I have really enjoyed about the site is the way it has brought people together. I have members who find the site who for one reason or another left the area when they were younger and don't know any of their Blackberry family. But through the site they have reconnected with long lost relatives, or discovered relatives they didn't know they had.
So there you have it. Purely by accident I managed to discover a useful tool for doing historical and genealogical research, and in the process created a virtual community that is, in a way, a piecing together of an older, shattered community. Our virtual Blackberry is a place that never existed in the real world, since it moves through time in a way that real people cannot, but it is now a place that sits atop or behind or beside the real world, informing it, deepening it, and allowing us to regrow connections and rebuild relationships in a way that is new and exciting and, in many ways, unprecedented.