Happy Birthday, West Virginia!

We were there for it!

Today is West Virginia’s birthday. One of the central questions that started my work on the book I’ve been yammering on about for several years now was “Can I be both an Appalachian and Jewish?” If the answer seems simple, that just means you are not nearly as good as overthinking things as I am. I’m about to turn in the manuscript, and I still don’t have an answer beyond, “You know, Appalachian is a fraught category, and we ought to look really hard at why that is, because it’s fascinating and enlightening, and it speaks a lot to the uses power makes of the idea of Appalachian identity.”

I am, however, fully and proudly a West Virginian. Here is a picture of my paternal grandmother’s grandfather, Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Rolen, in his Union uniform:

1852–1935

Birth 1852 • Smyth Co., VA

Death 15 DEC 1935 • Keystone, McDowell Co., WVA

I don’t know when he moved, or if he moved to be on the side of the Union, but I do know that he spent his adult life first as a soldier in the Union army and then in the “free and independent state of” McDowell County.

What snarls of identity have you found in your own work, friends writing family histories? Where do old categories begin to chafe, and what does that reveal about the history of the place(s) you are from?

Happy West Virginia Day! Celebrate with a slaw dog and maybe a Mountain Dew or some mountain dew.

Montani Semper Liberi