I have a somewhat unusual last name. Or at least I used to think so. I was born in Ohio, moved as a 6 year old to California, and throughout my years I never encountered another person with the same last name. The fact that my surname was easily twisted into a rather derogatory and embarrassing form as I wound my way through elementary and High School only fed my curiosity about it's origins. It was both a curse and a mystery to me. My last name is Pervatt. You don't need much of an imagination to conjure up the variation upon that name that plagued me throughout my school years.
My Grandfather was both an open book and a cipher. He was my favorite grandfather, if only by a nose. My Mom's Dad was also a great guy, but they were two very different people. The grandfather from whom I inherited my last name was a blank slate, in terms of his childhood, where he came from, his family, how he came to be where he was when my father was born. Even my father knew nothing about his Dad's past. And he must not have been very curious about it, either. My Dad was (is) a practical man...only the present matters...and the future. I was more curious than that.
I finally asked him one day, when I was already a teenager...where did you come from? Where were you born? Why did you leave? How did you get from where you were born to where you wound up?
I got answers to some, but not all of those questions. Turns out he was born in North Carolina. Lumberton, North Carolina. He ran away from home at the age of 15 and somehow ended up in either Eastern Kentucky or Western West Virginia. He was born in 1898. That put him in coal country on the eve of a great and violent labor movement to unionize coal miners. He worked for some time in the mines, living in a Company Town, getting paid in script, before he again pulled up roots and moved to Southern Ohio.
I gleaned from his guarded responses to my questions that he didn't get along well with his Dad and Mom...that times were hard...and he decided to take off on his own.
So one day, while having a discussion with my Dad about his father, and why he didn't know any more about the man than he did, even though he grew up with him...I picked up the phone, dialed long distance information for Lumberton, NC, and asked the operator if she had any listings for Pervatt.
"Which one?", she asked, in a southern accent.
"How many are there?", I asked. "Whew...there's a whole bunch.", she said.
I was amazed.
I asked for a Richard, since my grandfather had told me that he had a younger half brother by that name who was just 4 or 5 when he left home. She found a Richard Pervatt, sure enough, and gave me the phone number. I wrote it down and hesitated for several minutes before calling...but finally I did.
"You don't know me, but...." I explained I was looking for any relatives my grandfather might still have living there, and the guy who answered my call was very nice, but not one of them. "Give me your grandpa's full name and birthdate, and let me ask around the family...if I find something, I'll give you a call.", he said. I told him what I knew, not expecting much...but three days later he called me back.
My grandfather still had 2 sisters living who remembered him, it turns out. I don't know how he tracked them down, but Lumberton isn't that big of a town. I called my grandfather up and asked him if he remembered the two sisters whose names I was given, and he did. I told him they were still alive, and asked him if he'd like to get in touch with them. He did...and remained in touch with them for the rest of his life. It had been 60 years since he'd ran away from home, and had never had any contact with the family members he left behind.
Over the years, I delved much deeper into my family history, and it became a very rewarding hobby. The only family I drew a blank on was my Mom's mother's family. She was born in Kentucky, and once I got back to about 1875 the county records either were no longer existent or the dubious nature of the matriarch led me down a blind alley. Seems she had 3 kids by three different men...and it gets pretty murky.
That's genealogy. But it's also history, and after some 30 years of on again-off again pursuit of the hobby, it has proven to be not just an exercise in discovery of family roots, but a springboard to exploring areas of American history that take on a whole new level of interest because you are aware of the fact that your own people, those who came before you, lived in a certain place, at a certain time, and experienced what otherwise might be dry history.
I don't care where you come from...if you start digging into your roots everyplace has some fascinating history to it. Appalachia just happens to have more than its fair share.
Over the years I even met another person who was researching the same family I was on my Mother's side. She lived in San Diego, while I lived in LA. I drove down to meet her once, and as it turned out her family was the same as mine, and she even had two old letters written to her great aunt, in my great grandfather's hand, that had been kept in the family over the years. The letters told of how hard times were (circa 1895) due to the bad economy.
If you embark on the hobby of researching your family history, you will inevitably end up having a deeper appreciation of history in general...and pursuing topics that might never have called out to you otherwise. As for me...I still remember that phone call to a stranger that set me upon my own course. After many years, I finally had an opportunity to visit Lumberton, North Carolina. There isn't much there, to be honest. But I did see a cemetary with my family name on it, as well as a gas station and a couple of other businesses. It was sort of strange...knowing that my name was so common in this place, yet I had never encountered it in all my years of growing up.