Today, I got one of those “you have a new hint” messages from Ancestry. I get so many of them that I usually just ignore them. I would probably have ignored this one except that I was a little charmed to know know that my twice-great grandfather on my paternal grandmother’s side* was named after Benjamin Franklin, my favorite Founding Father. But there was this wonderful surprise waiting for me when I opened the link:
Frank was born in Smyth County, Virginia. He died in Keystone, WV. (Keystone is fascinating. An historically Black town, it was home to Matthew Thomas Whittico, the Black journalist who coined the phrase “the Free State of McDowell.”) I have no idea if he moved, or if the place in Virginia where he was born became the place in West Virginia where he died. But it means that through at least one family line, we’ve been West Virginians from pretty near, if not exactly since, the founding of the state. Does that matter to the question of whether or not I can be both Jewish and Appalachian? I’m still not sure. If I were, I’d send this book to the publisher already… but I’m still working that out.
I think Bonnie, his granddaughter, would have said it didn’t. She was a very narrow woman who was always angry my father had married a Jewish woman. But does it matter what she would have said? That I have figured out: it doesn’t. But it is strange to me that the most bigoted people in my family were descended from a Union soldier named after Benjamin Franklin who lived in a mostly-Black town with a history of being radically anti-racist. What important parts of our history are lost by the flattening of who counts as an Appalachian when we let other people tell us that we are supposed to be poor descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers when so many of us are not? (Though, through Bonnie, I guess I am in part.) The Polan brothers helped open up parts of West Virginia that couldn’t have survived without the goods the pack peddlers brought. Frank fought on the side of the Union that secured the future of our nation. Sure is starting to seem to me that my claim, then, to being truly West Virginian is unassailable… but does that make me Appalachian?
*Am I doing this write, people who write about family? Is "Twice great grandfather on my paternal grandmother's side" really the way to say this? It seems awkward and wordy.
I say yes, you are an Appalachian Jew. And my opinion counts, since I am your mama.