Finding Your Family in All That History

My imagination is ignited by the past. You and I continue to live out the consequences of the past every day of our lives. Many of my stories are set in Vashti, an imaginary place that stands in for many small southern towns, places where I was born, grew up, and lived most of my life. Both sets of my grandparents lived in the small town of Gough, Georgia, that sprang up because a new railroad track was built to connect the city of Augusta with points south and west.

 I occasionally mention real places and my stories are true from my perspective as a child or young adult. But the writing is often an effort to create a narrative for the lives of my parents and grandparents. The genealogical service, Ancestry, is helpful in some ways; but it often only helps to build a family “tree.”

I think its fair to say, many people are only interested in their ancestry to answer two questions: where did I come from; and will the identity of my ancestors give me some idea of who I am. What was their ethnicity? Were they rich or famous? But a name on a chart, giving the dates of births, deaths and marriages, or the names of parents and children, is only a beginning.

Without family letters, diaries, business records or commentary acounts by those who knew them, these inhabitants of our genealogical charts are two-dimensional at best. The results of our searching can leave us wondering who these people really were. What was important to them? What were their aspirations? Their passions? That is where the more difficult part of the journey begins, the place where we must understand the historical context that defined the lives of those we wish to know about. Though we may not always welcome what we find, what we discover can help explain who we are as well. History is hard, large and elusive, even for professional historians. Digging out the history that impacted your family will open your heart and mind to their hopes and disappointments.

I wrote in an earlier post about the contribution that Dr. Henry Louis Gates has made to the ancestral quest of so many of his guests on his televised series “Finding Your Routes (PBS).” As the series’ host, he makes it obvious that it takes a team of researchers, all of whom have some specialized training, to pull back the curtain and reveal or reconstruct the lives of our ancestors.

Most of us cannot call on Dr. Gates’ team or on his expertise. But rich resources are close at hand. A wider reading about the times in which our ancestors lived can lead us to answers as well as raise questions that we might never have considered. Most importantly, discovering the context for the world in which our ancestors lived awakens our imagination. Whatever we discover through a linear and literal search for our ancestors is likely to leave us unsatisfied, even disappointed, if we do not understand the fabric of their times, the context of their lives.

Let me share a bit of my own search and describe a couple of examples of broader histories that have cast new light my own family story, revealing what their ambitions and disappointments must have been and  how history bears down on us whether we are aware of it or not. In this newest age of individualism, identity politics and the obsessive search for our “true selves”, I think it is a healthy dose of reality to find that we are to some degree formed by a past we can explore, even though we did not live it ourselves.  

I often encounter Georgia natives who know little about their family history except how it was affected by the “Civil War”. But in fact, many families were equally and profoundly impacted by the events of the World War I era. At the beginning of the twentieth century my maternal grandfather married the daughter of a wealthy family of cotton farmers and gin owners in the “Black Belt” of east central Georgia. He and his father-in-law flourished in the years of the First World War. Even before the U.S. entered that war, cotton prices soared.

Today, along the streets of most medium and even small towns in Georgia, we can still find  grand houses, often in the classical revival style, that stand as reminders of the prosperous times in which they were built during and following the “Great War”. They are often mistaken for the homes of wealthy antebellum planters or relics of the Civil War era. , but are, I think, more often  the creation of an emerging southern middle class of bankers, physicians and merchants.

Bad times were on their way, as I learned from reading William Rawlings’ A Killing on Ring Jaw Bluff; The Great Recession and the Death of Small Town Georgia,  a book about the post-war collapse of cotton farming and the share-cropping system, wrapped in the disguise of a small-town murder mystery.  Rawlings’ book is “local history” at its best. It opened my eyes to the rampant inflationary spiral that ruined my grandfather’s bank in Gough, along with hundreds of other banks across the south. Cotton farmers and their sharecroppers could no longer borrow at low interest the money to plant the next year’s crops. And, inflation was driving their cost of operation dangerously high. Cotton stored in bonded warehouses served as cash, backing many millions in bank loans.

Hundreds of thousands of people left the rural south in the 1920’s; millions more left between 1929 and 1970. Cotton lands became next to worthless and many small towns died. Many more are still dying.. A “Great Migration” of sharecroppers and small landholders occurred as they abandoned the lands their families had worked, or even owned, for generations. They moved to the cities of the north, like Detroit, seeking jobs in the factories, especially those manufacturing automobiles, tires and all the other parts and services that the automobile required, as well as the appliances that 1920’s housewives were beginning to expect.

Rawlings’ wonderful economic history is set in Washington County which is adjacent to Burke County where my parents and I were born.  Although my family is not mentioned in the book, it offered a sound explanation for my family’s loss of status and helps explain as well why I am the only member of my immediate family to graduate from college.

I concluded that my grandfather must have been desperate. He had three young boys and a wife accustomed to at least some status and wealth in one of “God’s smallest places.” Granddad and his father-in-law had been involved in the founding of Gough. Granddad Kitchens’ wife inherited land, but that land had become all but worthless. The credit crunch devastated many small banks. Grandad’s Bank of Gough was one of them. How would he and his family survive? The only “industries” in Gough were the cotton gin owned by Grandad’s brother, and the railroad. Both suffered from the collapse of cotton farming.

 I found a clue among the many old photos I have, pictures saved by family members dating back into the 19^th century. It was a photo of my grandmother standing outside her apartment building in Tampa. I had never known my grandmother to leave Gough and was surprised to learn she and White had lived in Florida for a time, as had my nine-year old father and his brothers.  

Of course, I knew of the much- ballyhooed Florida “Land Bust” that occurred in the twenties.  But it now occurred to me that my family’s move to Florida coincided with the collapse of the real estate boom there. This led me to look for material on their life in Florida and suggested that the “bust” of the Florida land speculation bubble was the reason they moved back to Gough after living only two years in Tampa. No living relative could tell me anything about this period in our family’s life.

Most histories of the “Roaring Twenties” (I have read most of the best of them) treat the Florida  real estate “bust”  as an isolated phenomenon of only regional and short-lived  significance. But there is a new book out entitled Balloon in the Sun: The Florida Land Boom of the 1920’s and How it Brought on the Great Depression by Christopher Knowlton (2020). It was too recent to show up in local library collections, so I ordered it from Amazon, the “keeper of the keys” to all we have needed during the 2020 Epidemic.

According to Knowlton, Florida landscape speculation and its collapse was a national disaster. In the first place, it produced the largest migration in American history, when two and a half million people emigrated to Florida, where tropical beaches beckoned, a fortune could be made overnight in land speculation and where prohibition was ignored by most Florida authorities.

 Miami became overnight the playground of the rich-especially the newly rich. Grand development schemes and the glamor of a new paradise now served by a new American railroad along the length of Florida’s eastern seaboard, proved that modern technology could overcome any natural barrier.

Cities were rising from the palmetto scrub; and, advertised dreams of a tropical retirement were fueling the ubiquitous “Ad Men” who were themselves symbols of a new age. Investors, artists, movie stars and those who preyed upon the rich saw glamor and opportunity on the sandy shores of south Florida.  America was tired of the war, tired of the influenza epidemic. Soldiers home from the war had seen another world and were drawn to a new and energized frontier. Florida was the new land of excitement and wealth in the early 1920’s.

Automobiles were within the reach of many Americans by the mid-1920s. A new Ford Roadster could be had for only $295 (on credit of course).  Beginning in 1923, the roads into Florida were clogged. Roadside camping was common, orchards and groves became campgrounds overnight. It was bigger than the California and Klondike Gold Rushes, greater than the rush to claim “free” homestead lands in the west after the Civil War. And remains scantlily covered in history textbooks.

It was not surprising that my grandfather headed to Florida to try to recoup his flagging fortunes. He was after all, a land agent and a banker. The barrage of articles and advertisements touting Florida’s virtues and the immense profits to be made by investing in Florida land cannot have failed to ignite his imagination. How he found a job in a Tampa bank, I still can only guess. Banking laws were slack and credit was easy. There were millions to be made on  “margin,” that is, purchasing the right to purchase property at a later date.  Speculation was rampant and everybody from bank presidents and tycoons down to lowly newspaper boys were courting investors with offers of land for sale.

My father spent two very impressionable years in Tampa when he was nine and ten years old. He must surely have known of the the monumental engineering feats being carried out in south Florida such as the creation of man-made, offshore islands in Tampa Bay (literally right before his eyes) and the ongoing and much publicized building of the Tamiami Trail across the Florida peninsula. The latter was a feat that continues to concern wildlife biologists and ecologists today. But it was, at the time, an engineering feat akin to building the Panama Canal, or Henry Flagler’s building of the Florida East Coast Railroad through tidal basins, across enormous rivers and on lands consisting mostly of sand. Everything about Tampa must have seemed miraculous for a boy who had only lived in a tiny crossroads town surrounded by cotton fields. It was the “Age of the Engineer” and my father later became one. An engineer, Herbert Hoover, was soon to be elected president.

When the bubble burst, banks failed all over Florida as well as in nearby Georgia. My grandfather moved the family back home to Gough, Georgia. He probably had little choice. At least Gough was familiar ground and his extended family included prominent, well-off men, doctors, gin owners, even a postmaster in the nearby county seat. And he certainly could not have known that even more dire conditions were bearing down on America with the collapse of the stock market in the fall of 1929. A man ahead of his times, my grandfather had gone broke well before the Great Depression. IHe and his contemporay small businessmen might well have felt they were descending into hell as the wealth of generations evaporated.

The ways in which history touches the lives of ordinary people has fascinated me my entire adult life. It has shaped my choice of career and inspired most of my writing. Just in case some future genealogist, delving into our family charts, misses it: I am writing in December 2020 during a world-wide pandemic. All our futures are being shaped by the nastiest political campaigns anyone has seen in their lifetimes. My perceptions are colored by this world in which we live. So was my grandfather’s. Life never returns to “normal” after such events. We simply come to accept the “new normal,” which is never entirely either normal or new. To ignore what was going on around our ancestors, the history that was transforming their lives, is to ignore the elephant in the living room.