Paul Chambers🚧<p>TL;DR: Lost family history being recovered during article searches and public records; desire for first hand recollections of people now deceased.</p><p>I am the one who does the <a href="https://oldfriends.live/tags/familyTree" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>familyTree</span></a> and <a href="https://oldfriends.live/tags/genealogy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>genealogy</span></a> in the family.</p><p>Being satisfied with decades of lineage tracing, I am now going back and pulling specific newspaper and other records about family members and events that specifically touched them, going back, so far, to the early 1800, so far</p><p>I wished I had some first hand recollections of the stuff from the 1900s, esp with people who were alive in my lifetime that I knew and regularly interacted with, instead of finding out about it now, decades after people have died.</p><p>I often asked about family history only to be shut down. Esp. my grandparents. I asked about their parents, grandparents, etc. Some would have been born in the early 1800s. </p><p>Pulling some of these articles, I now know why they weren't eager to share some of the family history. I still wished I was able to get their POVs and stories.</p><p>Some were tragic events, like killings and accidents. More than a few killings in my family tree in the 1900s, both as victims and perpetrators, some near the time I was born. Two, after I was born. </p><p>The grandmother who raised me was the only survivor of a commercial dynamite factory that blew up. She was a black powder packer. </p><p>The grandfather who raised me went on trial for shooting and killing a man in self-defense just before I was born; Not guilty. He also went into the coal mines at like age 12. </p><p>People just wouldn't talk.</p><p>My sweet great grandmother, the mother of the grandmother that raised me, operated moonshine stills and had repeated issues with law enforcement. (I learned moonshining skills from my grandfather who operated a still semi-professionally until the early 80s. I helped, even.)</p><p>Another great-grandparent got arrested for stuffing the ballot boxes in the mid 1940s. (I know, right. lol)</p><p>My grandfather's grandpa was a founding member of the independent State of Scott. What did he know about that.</p><p>"The State of Scott was a Southern Unionist movement in Scott County, Tennessee, in which the county declared itself a "Free and Independent State" following Tennessee's decision to secede from the United States and align the state with the Confederacy on the eve of the American Civil War in 1861. Like much of East Tennessee, Scott became an enclave community of the Union during the war. Although its edict had never been officially recognized by either the Confederacy or the Union, the county did not officially rescind its act of secession until 1986."</p><p>No one would talk. Although, after my grandfather who raised me had his stroke, shortly before he died, he confided a lot of stuff with me and Penny that shocked us to our core regarding events of the late 1920s and 1930s. Some of what he said is checking out with the articles and public records I am now finding.</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Scott" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of</span><span class="invisible">_Scott</span></a></p>