Haven't We Met Somewhere Before?

I was in Yankee land, contemplating visits to my Southern family. It was 2003. I was feeling intimidated.

I had lived in Connecticut since 1964, far from my South Carolina cousins near the family homestead. There had been little contact between us since I moved to the North. They were Southern conservatives; I was a progressive.  It seemed hardly possible to bridge all those miles, years, and worldviews.

I needed to re-introduce myself to them. As a child in the South, much younger than my cousins, I had wondered whether they even noticed me. Now as a researcher, I felt like a stranger at a party. I imagined myself accosting some cousin with this opening line: "Hello. Haven't we met somewhere before, long ago?" Awkward.

Even so, I gathered my courage in 2003 and wrote to my cousin Joe in Sumter. I told him that I was the scared little six-year-old cousin from long ago, whom he had kindly reassured during a visit to the family farm. Joe was a large, confident high-school graduate back then.

I was writing to ask Joe's advice in researching our family history.

The bridge was under construction.

The next summer, Joe welcomed me into his home as the "long-lost cousin." Old and new relatives sat around the table. The familiar barbecued chicken and butter beans and biscuits were laid out for mid-day dinner. For my part, I had brought along the courtship letters of our grandfather, Tom Kirven, and our grandmother, Laura Fraser, written between 1894 and 1897. I had found these in my parents' attic and had typed their faded handwriting into a bound document of 135 single-spaced pages. I gave each of my family members a copy, as a token of my good faith.

For the next seven years I drove from city to city in South Carolina. I interviewed many branches of relatives in Sumter, Columbia, Greenville, Anderson, Darlington, and Kingstree. I talked with other cousins in Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky.  They were kindness personified, eager to help me with research. They allowed me the benefit of the doubt, I think, because I was Family. In the South, Family is pronounced with a capital letter.

These visits were not without conflict. We all steered our talks about family history through our different views on politics, religion, and race. My next blog post will delve into our struggles.