Ancestry Magazine

What do you do when you’re inspired to share the sheaves of notes, the piles of photos, the entire accumulation of your family’s past? You can take the traditional routes—planting information on a displayed family tree, framing photos, building a website, or slipping the whole shebang into scrapbook pages. Or you can choose an alternative avenue and find a new way to share your family’s story with the world. That’s what the following three artists did, and continue to do, through their family history inspired wines, stories, and songs.

Michael Taggares
Tagaris Winery
If you look, you can still find members of the Tagaris family residing in the Greek village of Tholo, not far from a statue of Emanuel Tagaris, the family patriarch who started planting vineyards there in the 1300s.

Half a world away in eastern Washington, it’s not much of a stretc h to say that winemaker Michael Taggares—a descendant of Emanuel Tagaris—has wine in his blood. Winemaking, you see, is a tradition, a love, and maybe even a hereditary trait that’s been passed down through generation after generation of the Tagaris family.

Ever since Emanuel planted his first grapevines, the Tagaris family has been connected to growing grapes. So much so that during battles in the Ottoman era, the women and children in the family would go into hiding in the Peloponnese, returning only to tend their vineyards. And, of course, make wine.

Eventually someone had to split away from the family’s vines. Pete Tagaris, Michael’s grandfather, was that someone, leaving Greece for America when he was just eighteen. He passed through Ellis Island and worked his way west as a cook on the railroads, during which time the family name became Taggarres. When Pete passed through Prosser, Washington, the land reminded him so much of his homeland that he settled there.

Grandpa Pete threw himself into homespun businesses, which eventually grew to include a car dealership, a grocery store, and a bank. But Pete never turned his back on the family love of farming and growing grapes. He made his own wines, storing the casks in his root cellar.

Today Michael celebrates his family’s vintner traditions through seven hundred acres of wine grapes and a portfolio of wines bearing the family name. In 1989 he established Tagaris Winery, adopting the name’s traditional spelling in honor of his roots. The winery’s new restaurant even houses a few of Grandpa Pete’s wine casks. Says Michael, the art, the business, and the wine bring together “the essence of what our family is all about—fine wine, farm fresh food, and lively conversation.”

Liz Petry
Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family’s Letters
Jessup, Georgia. 1 November 1905
I would not write you but I am in a terrible fix here I got into after leaveing [sic] Savannah . . .

After years as a reporter, Liz Petry knew she had a good story when she saw this letter among her mother’s papers.

The letter was from Willis H. James, writing to ask his sister for $35 to bribe a sheriff and escape a lynching. It was one of hundreds of letters written between 1890 and 1910 by Willis Samuel James, his wife Anna E. Houston James, and their children: Willis H., Bertha, Harriet, Harry, and Helen.

The James children had already been the basis for many stories by Liz Petry’s own mother, Ann, whose 1946 novel The Street was the first by an African American woman to sell over 1.5 million copies. But as Liz explored the letters, she found what she felt was untapped history—and new family.

Harry E. “Rama Hama” James, who wrote home saying “please send candy,” became Liz’s favorite character. “I hadn’t heard anything about Uncle Harry [before finding the letters],” she says.

Through each letter she read, she learned more about her ancestors and her extended family tree. Ultimately, the letters inspired Liz to craft her own book, driving her to quit her job as a journalist so she could focus full time on sharing her family’s history.

Today, Liz refers the published book, Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family’s Letters, as her “love letter to her family.” After editing and organizing six hundred pages of letters, she says, “what comes through is almost a story. This fierce family loyalty they had, caring for each other, financial support, emotional support,” she says.

Why a book? Says Liz, while each letter was intended to stand on its own, once she began reading the letters as a collective entity, she realized that the whole story of her family, as told through the words of the individual members, was far more powerful than its parts.

Eliza Gilkyson
Jedediah 1777
When Eliza Gilkyson set out a personal goal of writing a song exploring her “own roots in patriotism” for her album Paradise Hotel, she knew just where to look for inspiration. Her ancestral uncle Jedediah Huntington was a commanding brigadier general during the Revolutionary War. What she didn’t know was that Jedediah had his own song to sing.

A Google search for more information about her uncle led Eliza to an online auction for a collection of Jedediah’s letters. “I thought I would use [the collection] for my own purposes,” Eliza says, “but it became clear to me when I read the letters that his was a more interesting story and point of view.”

Eliza also learned that Jedediah had a way with words. “It was exciting when I found the first sentence I could actually sing. I thought, ‘If I could find five or six of these sentences . . . Jedediah could have his own song and his own voice.’”

The result is the song Jedediah 1777, written very much, says Gilkyson, in Jedediah’s own words. But not entirely. Gilkyson melds the two worlds—hers and her uncle’s—so seamlessly that the listener is hard-pressed to tell who is whom, even as Jedediah talks about hearth and fields, the “noble cause,” and his developing relationship with Ann Moore.

Gilkyson’s attempt to honor her roots also extend beyond words—even the instrumentation was suggested by the song’s historical context, with a penny whistle substituting for a fife.

Today the Revolutionary War isn’t just another history lesson for Gilkyson. “It was a family event. It’s no longer a textbook thing,” she says. Creating and celebrating in her own unique style, a life and a history through song is now more than a personal quest—it’s a work of art she shares with her ances tor and listeners all over the world. And one through which she continues to find inspiration.

“[The project] gave me this foundation to lean against,” says Gilkyson, “[and] the strength to stand up for my own beliefs.” More than two hundred years later, Jedediah’s voice is as commanding as ever.

Paul Rawlins lives in Salt Lake City, where he is waging a hapless battle to resuscitate his lawn.