births and marriages and deaths entered carefully as the book itself was passed down over the generations into the present day. Others show up in faded letters sent from faraway relatives recalling places and events, pooling information that might reconstruct a family’s journey. Still others appear in the handwritten notes of people like my maternal grandmother, who when I was twelve years old finally wrote out an amazingly accurate eleven-page summary of her family’s movement from Virginia through Tennessee, then down into Mississippi and finally into Arkansas, replete with the dates of births and deaths, marriages, and military enlistments. Granny Doyle had been carrying all of this in her head, passed down from mother to daughter through each generation in singsong verses on the narrow front porch of some latest cabin as the hot summer sun gave way to a sultry, bugfilled evening, or huddled next to the fireplace before there ever was such a thing as radio to fill the boredom of a winter night.
My Daddy was Francis Adolphus Doyle. His great grand daddy Zachariah Thomas Doyle was in the War of 1812 in Hicks Ford, Virginia, a town that later became known as Emporia. My Mama was Louella Marsh, the only member of her family except for her Daddy to survive the cholera epidemic that swept the Memphis area in 1873. My Mama’s Daddy was Samuel Jasper Marsh, whose family came to Tennessee from North Carolina and who himself helped settle Woodruff County Arkansas. Samuel Marsh enlisted in the Eighth Arkansas Infantry in July 1861, then later on returned to Tipton County, Tennessee and served in the Confederate army over there. My Mama’s Mama was Parmelia Long Marsh, whose brother Alec Long was a Confederate soldier and died of smallpox in a Federal prisoner of war camp in Alton Illinois. My Grandpa Samuel caught the cholera when he took a mule run of cotton into Memphis during the epidemic, and came on home to die. Then the whole family caught it, and only Samuel and my Mama Louella survived. When Parmelia died of the cholera, before Samuel buried her he cut off a lock of her hair and a piece of her dress and wrapped it in her wedding glove. He kept it with him, along with her wedding ring, until the day he died. Your great aunt Lena still has those things, and since she has no natural children maybe she’ll pass them on to you when she dies. . . .
And here, as I sort through reams of family genealogy, is a note written to me by my father nearly thirty years ago. Along with the note, he sent me dozens of pages copied from a book called
History of the House of Ochiltree
. Written in 1916 and published by a remote press in a small Kansas town, the book traced a group of families that had their beginnings in the Ochil Hills of Ayrshire, Scotland, just west of Stirling, where William Wallace turned back Proud Edward’s army and not far from the battlefield of Bannockburn. These were Braveheart’s people. The families included many of my father’s direct ancestors such as the McKnights (also known as McNaught and McNaughton), the Leckeys, the Leeches, the Johnsons, and the Millers. All of them made the long trek from western Scotland to Northern Ireland and then later to the Pennsylvania and Virginia colonies and beyond. The book was never intended to be great literature, but like so many similar works of family genealogy, it was a means of capturing vital family information before it became lost in the frenzy of America’s obsession with the future rather than the past. And in that sense its author, Clementine Brown Railey, succeeded quite well.
As was his fashion, my father had marked a few sections of the book for my perusal. Along with it he also sent me a dozen typewritten pages, worn and faded with age, filled with amplifications and personal observations about different family members mentioned in the
House of Ochiltree
book. I do not know their origins, but the typed pages appear to be the transcript of a personal
My Daddy was Francis Adolphus Doyle. His great grand daddy Zachariah Thomas Doyle was in the War of 1812 in Hicks Ford, Virginia, a town that later became known as Emporia. My Mama was Louella Marsh, the only member of her family except for her Daddy to survive the cholera epidemic that swept the Memphis area in 1873. My Mama’s Daddy was Samuel Jasper Marsh, whose family came to Tennessee from North Carolina and who himself helped settle Woodruff County Arkansas. Samuel Marsh enlisted in the Eighth Arkansas Infantry in July 1861, then later on returned to Tipton County, Tennessee and served in the Confederate army over there. My Mama’s Mama was Parmelia Long Marsh, whose brother Alec Long was a Confederate soldier and died of smallpox in a Federal prisoner of war camp in Alton Illinois. My Grandpa Samuel caught the cholera when he took a mule run of cotton into Memphis during the epidemic, and came on home to die. Then the whole family caught it, and only Samuel and my Mama Louella survived. When Parmelia died of the cholera, before Samuel buried her he cut off a lock of her hair and a piece of her dress and wrapped it in her wedding glove. He kept it with him, along with her wedding ring, until the day he died. Your great aunt Lena still has those things, and since she has no natural children maybe she’ll pass them on to you when she dies. . . .
And here, as I sort through reams of family genealogy, is a note written to me by my father nearly thirty years ago. Along with the note, he sent me dozens of pages copied from a book called
History of the House of Ochiltree
. Written in 1916 and published by a remote press in a small Kansas town, the book traced a group of families that had their beginnings in the Ochil Hills of Ayrshire, Scotland, just west of Stirling, where William Wallace turned back Proud Edward’s army and not far from the battlefield of Bannockburn. These were Braveheart’s people. The families included many of my father’s direct ancestors such as the McKnights (also known as McNaught and McNaughton), the Leckeys, the Leeches, the Johnsons, and the Millers. All of them made the long trek from western Scotland to Northern Ireland and then later to the Pennsylvania and Virginia colonies and beyond. The book was never intended to be great literature, but like so many similar works of family genealogy, it was a means of capturing vital family information before it became lost in the frenzy of America’s obsession with the future rather than the past. And in that sense its author, Clementine Brown Railey, succeeded quite well.
As was his fashion, my father had marked a few sections of the book for my perusal. Along with it he also sent me a dozen typewritten pages, worn and faded with age, filled with amplifications and personal observations about different family members mentioned in the
House of Ochiltree
book. I do not know their origins, but the typed pages appear to be the transcript of a personal
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