Time Traveling Tourist

 

If I could time travel, I would for certain carry a good supply of paper and pens with me, as well as a camera! I think that I might go back to 1545 to Belsay Castle in Northumberland England, close to the border with Scotland. There, I believe that I could meet my 13X great-grandparents Lancelot and Ann Fenwick Middleton, as well as my 12X great-grandpa George, a baby at that time.

The Belsay Castle had been built by Middletons and inhabited by them for some time. It would be nice to visit a real castle that was actually a historical family home and a castle seems so far removed from the simple abodes of other family members that I am familiar with. I could have visited other greats there, but I just could not resist visiting my family’s very own Lancelot!

So, I would visit my greats and I would surely pester them for stories concerning our family history. I would observe how they went about their lives living in a castle already a few centuries old. I would record everything on my paper and with my camera so that I could bring it all back with me to share with current family. And while they shared family history with me, I would share family future with them. I would tell them stories of their 10XG grandson  Calvin Middleton and his daughter Nancy Middleton Smith. I would tell them about some of the simple but so fine folks that resulted from their union.

Now, Belsay castle is just over 21 miles from Hadrian’s Wall which had been built by Roman Emperor Hadrian to defend Rome’s northernmost holds from invading Scots. If I could use my time travel skills to zoom on over to Hadrian’s Wall rather than depending upon the travel methods of the day, I would certainly visit that historic site before visiting Scotland.

My DNA indicates 40% Scottish ethnicity so I must have a few ancestors from there. I suspect that my McQueen and Davidson lines may have originated in Scotland. Even if I couldn’t visit specific places where they lived because I just don’t know where that is, it would be wonderful to visit their homeland and imagine that the sights I was seeing were once viewed through their eyes too.

I would also visit Ireland. I know that my Nolen and Flanary lines have ties to Ireland and others likely do, as well. I would visit County Carlow. My 13XG Gpa Donough Hugh Nowlin was born there in 1545 so I could meet his dad 14 XG gpa Awly Nuallain Nowlin and find out who 14XG gma was! Perhaps I could even rock my 13XG gpa to sleep while singing a lullaby! I would love to visit Dublin where my 9XG grandpa Pierce Nowland was born. He would in the future migrate to America and reside in Virginia.  

I imagine that the landscape of both Scotland and Ireland would make me feel right at home. I always feel like a prodigal daughter come home when I am in the Appalachians and those mountains were once connected to the mountains of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. They were all part of the Central Pangean Mountains of the supercontinent Pangaea during the Triassic period. They would later drift apart but perhaps there is some metaphysical tie that is not as easily rent asunder as mere stone, trees, and earth. My ancestors who left Ireland and Scotland for America and traveled to eventually settle in Appalachia must have felt a familiarity and perhaps felt like they had come “home” also.

So, that is my where and when I would travel for my distant past time travel. I would love to do as I have written, but I have a greater desire to travel to a place and time less distant and more recent. For this trip, I would want to be accompanied by my children, my niece, and my granddaughter and we would go back to around 1967 to Anglin Branch in Owsley County, Kentucky. Who knows we might even run into me as a seven-year-old visiting Grandpa and Grandma David and Nancy Middleton Smith with my parents and my younger brother David. That would be kind of freaky seeing myself as a seven-year-old, But it would be neat for my kids, my niece, and my granddaughter to see me as a kid, their uncle and father as a kid, and their grandparents when they were quite young. Of course, they know that we once were young too, but they probably have a difficult time imagining that. Heck, sometimes I have a hard time imagining those wonderful and carefree days too!

Even as a child, visiting my grandparents there on Anglin was like a "traveling back in time" adventure.

My family lived in Dayton, Ohio. Our home was very modest, but we did have indoor facilities and we got our drinking water from the faucet in the kitchen. It had central heat from a furnace. We lived on quiet and paved Knox Avenue. We had a pretty nice little yard but it wasn’t huge. We could easily see the homes of neighbors living to the left and right of us and the fore and aft of us. There was a pretty nice field directly in front of our house that belonged to our trash man Bill Guthrie but houses lined much of the street. We had a telephone and television. Of course, our television was not anything like current TVs. They were big and boxy and only had a few channels and the black and white programming went off the air at midnight.

Now when we visited Grandpa and Grandma, we traveled into the hills of Eastern Kentucky. We traveled some curvy roads to get there and my brother David, who was prone to car-sickness, would often have to move up to the front seat. It seems that watching the landscape coming at you through the windshield is less stomach-curdling than seeing it fly by out the side window. So we traveled some “treacherous” roads to arrive at Anglin Branch Road. Now back then, Anglin Branch Road was just a dirt road and did not even have gravel. Anglin branch had its own little twists and turns and rises and falls. When that dirt got wet, and it seemed that our visits were often accompanied by rain, the dirt of Anglin Branch would turn into a mud slick. No one drives better than my dad, but when it rained, often even Dad could not coax the car to navigate that mud slick. He would often have to park the car and we would walk the rest of the way to Grandpa and Grandma’s house.

There were a few folks who lived along the way. I remember Oscar and Laura Edwards lived in a little white house tucked back into a holler on the right. Laura always had the most beautiful flowers around her house; sultanas, lantanas…I can’t remember what they all were but I know that they were all beautiful! Lishie and Sarah Green lived in a house on the left. I don’t remember much about them but Sarah was some kind of cousin.

There was a log type two-story home on the left just before reaching Grandpa and Grandma’s house. This is where Laura Edward’s father Henry “Hen” Sandlin had lived. In 1957, despondent over ill health, he went to his barn and hung himself. Grandpa was the one who had cut him down from the rope hanging from the rafters.

So after passing Hen’s old place, Grandpa and Grandma’s little piece of Heaven was there on the left. It was a little white-sided farmhouse. In the winter, smoke would be rising from the coal stove in the living room and the coal grate in the bedroom. That and layers of Grandma’s handmade quilts was what kept a body warm in winter. In summer, Grandma had flowers in the yard. She always had a couple of old tire planters filled with moss roses. I remember hollyhocks blooming profusely in the side yard. Dad tells me that Grandma had grown huge dahlias as big as dinner plates at some time, but I don’t remember them so maybe that was before my time.

Grandpa and Grandma had electricity and a faucet in the kitchen which they used for washing dishes and filling washbasins and tubs for sponge baths and tub baths. They didn’t have indoor facilities but they had a two-holer outhouse down a worn path alongside the waters of Anglin Branch. There Charmin was replaced with outdated Sears and Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, Alden, Spiegel and J C Penney catalogs. At night, we would slide a five-gallon lard stand converted into a chamber pot from under the bed to pee. I can almost hear the sound of pee hitting the side of that metal lard stand!

Grandma drew drinking water from a well just off of the back porch. She would drop a bucket down into the well and then pull up some of the coolest and sweetest water to cross any lips. She would pour the water from the well bucket into a metal bucket that would be kept on the enameled Hoosier cabinet in the kitchen. There was an aluminum dipper that rested in the bucket and everyone would dip out a drink of water and sip it down from the dipper before placing it back into the bucket for the next thirsty person. Thankfully, we didn’t have worries about Covid-19 back then!

Now, back in Dayton, some family members had enough land to raise gardens so we did have homegrown produce there but much of our food came from the local grocery. On Anglin, Grandma gathered eggs for breakfast from her laying hens. If a hen had quit laying or too many roosters tried to rule the roost, we might even have chicken and dumplings or some scrumptious fried chicken. Grandpa milked the cow for milk and Grandma would skim the cream off of the top and rock it in a gallon jug over her knee until she had some delicious butter. If visiting during the cool times, a hog might be slaughtered and we could have some fresh pork tenderloin to eat with Grandma’s homemade buttermilk biscuits, tenderloin gravy and fried apples. Sometimes Dad would pour a bit of Bob White syrup onto his plate and mix in some butter to eat with a biscuit.

Grandpa and Grandma didn’t have a salt shaker; they had a little bowl of salt that they kept on the table. If you needed salt, you would take a pinch and sprinkle it over your food. Grandpa had to use salt substitute because of heart trouble so he was stuck mundanely shaking from the little cardboard “bottle” of a substitute. He didn’t get to pinch like the rest of us.

Grandpa and Grandma raised a big garden and Grandma knew how to turn that produce into tasty meals. Fresh corn and green beans, new potatoes, juicy ripe tomatoes, sweet potatoes…  Grandma made them into meals fit for royalty or even some of her Middleton ancestors that called a castle home!

She also knew how to preserve that produce for later. Some like arsh potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, cabbages… could be stored for a time in a root cellar. She canned much of their garden harvest and she even canned sausage. She also dried apples, pumpkin rings and I can remember helping to make green bean necklaces to dry for shuck beans. She made lots of jellies, jams and butters from the fruits they grew.

Grandpa had an old mule and a horse named Silver. Grandpa grew tobacco to make a little money and he used the mule to plow the tobacco base and his garden spot. I have seen both him and Uncle Gayle walking behind the mule-pulled plow geeing and hawing to let the mule know where to go. In Dayton, my uncles used tractors to plow their fields but on Anglin, time marched at a slower pace and old ways still clung to life. Mule power still won out over horsepower.

Grandpa and Grandma did not have a television or telephone for many years. They would get them later, but I don’t really recall them having a TV. It sounds like it would be a boring place for kids but there was a creek behind their house. In that creek, there were minnows and crawdaddies that called to children like sirens. We would borrow one of Grandma’s mason jars or an empty coffee tin that hadn’t already been repurposed as a spittoon and we would wade in the creek, lifting rocks trying to make temporary hostages of the crawdaddies and minnows that would dart by. We would show our catches off and then slip them back into the creek so we could use our jar to catch fireflies. Sometimes we would spy a blue-tailed lizard and take chase. I don’t recall ever catching one and I honestly don’t know what I would have done if I had caught one; probably immediately drop it!

While revisiting my grandparents, I would ask them all of the questions that I never realized that I had while they lived. I would ask Grandpa about his family. I would get him to open his trunk and tell me who all of the folks in the photos were. I would ask him if the picture or two that we think are of his dad Billy really are Billy. I would ask him who Eula was. I would ask Grandma what her favorite color was, how she came to meet Grandpa, what her happiest moments were. Mostly, I would hug them and tell them how very much I love them.

I would sit on the front porch upon woven-bottomed, straight-back chairs with Grandma, Grandpa, my children, my granddaughter and my niece. Grandma would likely be rocking a jar filled with cream over her knee and Grandpa would likely be shaving curls of aromatic cedar from his whittling stick. We would listen to the music of a cooling rain on the tin of the porch roof and as the mist began to rise from the hillsides in front of us, my children, my granddaughter, and my niece could hear from my grandpa about how when the mists hang in the hills, his giant friend that lives there is smoking his pipe.

Perhaps, they would be terribly bored to go with me on my trip back to see Grandpa and Grandma, but I hope that for the short time of our visit, they could step away from the busyness and distractions of today, deeply breathe in fresh air full of the scent of rich earth and just enjoy the simple lives of simple, but oh such very special people that were their great and great-great grandparents. I hope that they could understand what truly strong and loving folks they come from! 

I would also hope that Grandpa and Grandma would meet their great-grandchildren and great-great-granddaughter  and could understand what truly strong, loving folks have resulted from their union! Our strong roots have resulted in some strong, beautiful, empathetic and loving branches!