Ancestry Magazine

Never assume a mundane project won’t turn up some wonderfully juicy details.

I thought I was well prepared for anything I might find in my family’s past. I’d encountered a few misdeeds of some of my less-than-sterling progenitors—like the Oklahoma outlaw, the Arkansas perjurer, the Indian Territory multiple bigamist, or the North Carolina church clerk who was
excommunicated for imbibing too much of his homemade peach brandy. But I wasn’t ready for the surprise I got when I opened up my family’s skeleton closet and threw light on my Alabama ancestors.

I have my share of farmers and planters, but the majority of my ancestors did not make their living tilling the soil. Instead they were teamsters, millwrights, miners, blacksmiths, carpenters, preachers, doctors, sheriffs, court clerks, justices, lawyers, and (gasp) a few were politicians. We all have our black sheep.

Peering into the past provides insight into our ancestors’ ordinary lives, the things history books don’t teach us. And so it happened one day, I was at the Family History Library in Salt Lake cranking microfilm and trying to sort through relationships with some rather dull, dry, Reconstruction-era deeds from a county in northeast Alabama. It really brought home how tough times were for Southern families after the Civil War. These folks, my ancestors, were regularly mortgaging their property to borrow $100 to make a crop, then paying off the debt after harvest and borrowing it again the next year to buy seeds to plant.

So, dull as the land records were, I plowed on, so to speak. However, I had almost dozed off at my reader when I realized that a particular record said $500—not the usual $100. It was my great-great-grandfather who was mortgaging his 40 acres in order to obtain a “federal bond” for his son, my great-grandpa.

A federal what?

There were no more filmed records at the library to help me with this puzzle. I was left hanging on a genealogical cliff, and it would take me several months of digging in federal court records to uncover the details of my great-grandpa’s transgressions against the government.
I should have known better. Mother always warned me about digging into the past.
Great-grandpa was charged for violation of the Internal Revenue Law of the United States. Boring? Of course not. He was arrested and put in jail and forfeited the $500 bond. And while my great-grandfather never listed “moonshiner” on the census records, it’s clear that’s what he was. As I continued to dig in the court records—he appealed the case—I learned that his father-in-law owned the still and his wife handled retail marketing. Well, that’s a nice way to say my great-grandma was peddling the hooch.

Sometimes I feel like slamming the closet door and just letting these skeletons rattle. But then ordinary farmers seem so boring to trace.

Myra Vanderpool Gormley spends her days detangling her illustrious roots and pruning her family’s notorious branches—the latter being a seemingly full-time job. Reach her at myravg@wamail.net.