Why Ancestry is Only Part of Your Story

Like most people with even a vague sense that they have ancestors that must somehow have influenced their lives, I subscribed to Ancestry.com and spent some time rummaging through censuses and government records to build a chart of my family heritage. Ancestry is a wonderful tool, but I suspect most southerners get hooked on finding all their ancestors who fought in the Civil War. Its no surprise that the most often requested library census records are for the 1860 census, the last one prior to the bombardment of Fort Sumter. But “fleshing out” the real story of our ancestors can be daunting, time consuming and even expensive. Joining heritage societies (of which their seem to be hundreds) often require pretty elaborate proof in order to join. Frankly, while recognizing the social and historical value of such organizations, joining one of them interests me but little .

What does interest me is learning about the people who influenced my parents, and therefore me and my immediate family. For me this includes primarily the parents and grandparents of my own parents. I am a historian by profession and as you may recall , I am researching the terrible banking crisis in Georgia in the years following World War I. My interest is focused on in my grandfather’s career as a smalltown banker, and I am trying to discover why his bank failed and why he experienced personal bankruptcy. When I stumbled upon the remarkable story of why 183 banks in Georgia (and a few in Florida) failed in a matter of weeks in 1926 , I thought: here at last is the link between my family’s misfortunes and the worst financial crisis in the south since the Civil War.

I have invested countless hours researching both the crisis and the effect it had on my grandparents, my parents and even on me. This seems much closer to the events shaping my own and my parents’ lives than learning that my ancestors fought at Gettysburg -which they actually did. Events of the 1920’s occurred when my parents were children, shaped their young lives and prospects, and led to my being the first member of my family ever to graduate from college.

I have also learned along the way that the standard histories of Georgia (and I studied under and with some of the authors of these histories) hardly bothered to explain anything about why Georgia became virtually a third world country in the 1920’s -even before the Great Depression struck in October of 1929. Having taught college history classes for many years, I must admit that I have lulled many a student to sleep the moment I brought up economic, financial or business history. Its difficult to maintain student interest unless you are describing wars, rebellions, colorful presidents or contentious politicians, so by default-student evaluations being what they are-you often find yourself teaching to the students’ interests.

General histories of Georgia do include a chapter on the 1920’s and inevitably its the boll weevil, racially inspired lynching and “Gene” Talmadge that fill the pages. Talmadge was essentially a demagogue of the type typical throughout the South in the post World War I years: he hated the national government, and blamed Georgia Power for the worst of every farmers problems, while essentially running his campaign with Georgia Power campaign contributions. He was, to put it as delicately as possible, a rabble-rousing racist.

Talmadge was popular with disgruntled, debt-ridden farmers, many of whom were sharecroppers who plowed small acreage on credit-and were still broke even after the cotton crop was harvested. When worst-came to worse, these “redneck” farmers, who deserved much more for their vote, were forced to sell their mule and flee the south. This marked the beginning of a century of decline for small town Georgia. Credit-based farming made it possible to stay on the farm, but impossible to ever escape what amounted to peonage. Inflation and declining cotton prices combined to end a way of life for many families.

The boll weevil had been working its way east out of Texas since before the Great War and this insect ruined many a cotton farmer’s taste for farming when it arrived in Georgia. But Georgia farmers adjusted to some extent. My great grandmother, “Mintie” Wright was a widow with a house full of kids. Her small cotton crop would provide the only meager cash she could hope to earn. Like many farmers she spent what money she had saved to buy an arsenic concoction to “paint” on the boles of the cotton plants. This was supposed to kill the boll weevils and it did work if applied at just the right time and before the next rain washed it off. The children (including my grandmother Carrie) were all provided with miniature “mops” with which to apply the poison directly on the as-yet unopened cotton boles.

Cotton was an all- but- losing cause. The price per pound collapsed in 1920 from nearly a dollar per pound to a nickel. Tens of thousand of people would leave the south in the great exodus that followed, often looking for work in the northern industrial cities, searching, as one writer put it “for the warmth of other suns.” The crossroads towns that had been spawned by the enormous number of new railroad tracks late in the nineteenth century and opening years of the twentieth century would begin to “die on the vine.” Farmers turned to raising chickens, pecans and peaches. Wives made chenille bed spreads and “divinity” candy to sell to the droves of tourists headed for Florida along Georgia roads.

There was another dying off. A budding small-town middle class had arisen in the years leading up to the Great War. The way to modest riches was opened by the arrival of the automobile and Coca Cola. Having a common water supply often defined the identity of each new town and provided a tank on which the name of the town was proudly spelled out. They were known as “tank towns.” All such towns had a store. They were often named “Planters Store” or “Farmers General Store.” A bank, a cotton gin, an automobile service station, a repair garage, and perhaps a soft drink bottling plant, became the foundations of new wealth.

Where once only rural Baptist churches existed, “cityfied” Methodist or Presbyterian congregations might be formed with the appearance of the new and “middling” class of business men. Atop this new social order were those whose parents or grandparents had owned plantations. By selling off the plantations, fathers found money to finance a start in life for their son or a means of introducing his daughters to the appropriate bachelors, hopefully up and coming “go-getters” as they were often called. Old plantation lands were now loaned out “on shares” to tenant farmers. In the new towns, a new middle class was often recognizable by its attendance at the new Methodist Church because they arrived in an automobile. Saturdays brought farm families to town in mule wagons. As a boy, I actually saw these Saturday gatherings in Gough, Wrens, Waynesboro and Louisville. I was witness to a dying way of life.

For all my meandering here, I simply am urging people who seek to understand the world in which their ancestors lived, to look a little closer to the present and explore the stories of their parents and grandparents -or even their great grandparents. I believe we are likely in this way to discover much about the influences that shaped out own lives and that will shape those of our children.