Historicizing Heritage

The Romines-Smith family tree represents the intangible cultural heritage of my kinship and connection to Kentucky, a state I’ve never lived in but where all my ancestral blood comes from. There is a discomfort to my heritage, knowing it is not truly mine to claim, and yet the throughlines are still there, growing ever fainter. There is guilt in my heritage, about how smoothly my life runs compared to my father’s experience with Kentucky expat parents raising him and his eight siblings in a Northern Indiana home, lacking indoor plumbing and electricity. Going back to my great-grandmother, the guilt deepens, after I learned the story of how she was traded in marriage at fourteen to a seventy-four-year old man in exchange for an apple orchard. The family tree and the links between all of us are clear and unbroken, and yet the vast difference in lived experience between me and my grandmother, her mother, and her mother make the connections feel so close to severing that I wonder if they are even mine to claim.

Overlaid with the small portion of my included family tree are pictures of myself and the women in my patrilineal line—my Grandma Mary, Susan Bishop who was a child bride, and the mother who sold her, Mary Jane Fields, who (according to family lore) struck a woman in the chest with a hatchet because she had been hanging around my great-great grandfather. The blow was eventually fatal, two weeks after the fact, with the cause of death listed as pneumonia. Looking back into my family tree, and shuddering, and then looking ahead to see the comfort, safety, and privilege granted to me by fortune of birth is a whiplash type of experience. Grappling with who I descend from and how unimaginable my life would be to those women is the tension that I am playing with in my current creative nonfiction work, and is what drew me to the Historicizing Heritage workshop and its interest in the past Appalachian experience.