Traveling On

Having spent the last few days on the first in a series of ancestral travelers along this dusty trail, I am moving on. Leaving Margaret Lynn and John Lewis isn't easy. I find their story captivating. Speaking of "captivating", the dire circumstance I mentioned yesterday had to do with a kidnapping that left the family temporarily bereft of hope.  More on that and on their life in general appears in my Southern Bypass book.  My information came solely from the copy of Margaret's journal I found in "the box" mentioned at the onset of this blog. My research to find the original manuscript led to a dead end, but the contents of her diary that relate to early Staunton and to the Lewis family are well-documented.

To complete my coverage of this early tale, I'll use Margaret Lynns' summation of her children as adults. She wrote that Charles, the youngest son, died in battle at Point Pleasant, and William was confined by sickness, but had thirteen sickness. Apparently his sickness came late in life. At the end of her journal she wrote:

"...I feel like a traveler whose way was laid by a devious and uphill road, now in some sweet peaceful day, turns to survey the way he has come... Dear Andrew, who is known as General Lewis, still follows the fortunes of his great chief, Washington...Thomas is in the honorable House of Burgessess."

The fate of dear Alice is somewhat a mystery, but the journal says she married and every now and then, with a far away look, retold the story of her days as White Dove.

The photo is of the clip made from the knee-buckles worn by Andrew Lewis when he served under General George Washington.  The description was written by my grandmother. The initials on the clip are EG, Elizabeth Lewis Gilmer, the granddaughter of Margaret Lynn and John Lewis.

Adieu for now to my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, Margaret Lynn Lewis. She died in 1773, eleven years after her husband's death in 1762.
Tomorrow, a new member of the cast will be introduced.

Next Step

So. I had retrieved "the box" from a closet of memories and mess. Old Boy Scout uniforms and a wedding dress--gone, along with years of clutter. But the filthy insect-spotted letters and ancient paper had been rescued and waited in the car with the Old Paris porcelain and Waterford crystal.

I have been uninterested in old family relics and tales that have been stuffed down my throat since I was a baby. Being the only girl in a clan with three brothers, maybe I should have inherited the old family spirit. Alas! All these treasures, these family heirlooms, meant little to me. Nor had they ever. I had resented the constant reminders of the past and wholeheartedly blasphemed the family’s loyalty to “The Lost Cause”. Call me a heritage heretic. All the pieces of the past the family had cherished through the years were pieces of needless debris in my mind.

Traitor that I was, I felt no devotion to those people or things. To make me a bigger turn-coat, the thought occurred to me that I might be able to make some money off some of this stuff. Maybe, the old guys fortuitously waited to endow me with their things for my financial well-being. Funny how the mind goes in circles, especially when it's dizzy with dust, aching from such strain. And dealing with the loss of things that DID matter-like a family home and a mother.

These last four years as I began to organize the stacks of letters and documents, I realized why all the Southern history had been collected in one single place. The Sophie Bibb Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, named for my great-great-great grandmother, stored their archives in the old Bibb home where the group frequently convened. When the home was demolished, most of its belongings went with my grandmother to my house on Thorn Place. The majority of the documents included in my book and on my blog are the remnants of those archives.

Tiptoeing In

Well. This is my entrance onto the highway encircling time and lives from the days of dust to the present din of fast paced travels. I'll be adding editions to this labyrinth and by the end, will have covered a few centuries using letters, documents, photos...all in my personal collection of family archives. They say the Southern Bypass outside Montgomery, Alabama, takes a traveller quickly around and out of town, sometimes a good thing. But I say it misses the heart of the town, the town I know as home, the town my ancestors knew as home when they were among the earliest settlers in the town by the river. First edition coming soon, notwithstanding the holidays. Talk about fast paced travels! This should be fun and I hope to have some traveling companions who don't have the need to travel fast or direct my path. Hmmm. I may be traveling solo. Well, except for the old guys who'll give the direction I need to make this journey possible.