I've no doubt this qualifies as BS.

Easter weekend we are taking a trek with several family members way back into the hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky to visit the homeplaces and graveyards of my paternal family. The trip was originally planned for last fall but had to be cancelled.

Sister Annie started getting involved with doing genealogical research about a year ago, and it has been quite interesting. Our cultural heritage is predominantly Scotch-Irish and Welsh. All of our old world ancestors on both sides of the family came to America well before the revolution, and all of them headed for the Appalachian mountains very quickly, whether they landed in New Jersey, North Carolina, or several ports in between. All came from areas of the British Isles and during times that suggest hard times in the old world, and religious dissent as the motivators. That was not a surprise. What was a surprise was to learn that we have Native Americans in our ancestry on the paternal side. My 5 times great grandmother was half Cherokee., Anne White Cloud.   Her son, my 4 times great grandfather, was a spy for the Colonial army among tribes that fought on behalf of the British, was captured by Native Americans and taken to Ohio, where he lived for several years. It is not clear what tribe he was with, but it appears to have been one of the tribes that lived near Lake Erie. He married my 4 times great grandmother while living with them. Her father was a french fur trader and her mother was Native American.

Their gravesites are among those we are going to try to visit. We know from Annie's correspondence with distant cousins that the graveyard and grave stones still stand, but the area all around the graveyard was strip-mined about 50 years ago. The graveyard is on top of a ridge. Regulations forbade the coal company from disturbing the graveyard itself, but they stripped all around it, so access is up what nearly amounts to a cliff. Even before it was stripped, access was tough. My Dad remembers being a pallbearer for his grandfather, when I was a baby, and the ordeal it was to carry that coffin up the side of the ridge through the woods even before it was stripped.

Funny thing is this - there has long been a family legend that there was Cherokee on the maternal side of my family, but a number of family members have done research in recent years and that appears to not be true. There was never a word spoken about it on the paternal side, however. That grandfather, (Phillip Williams), was legendary in his revolutionary war activities, and was known in the family as Phillip the Indian Fighter. But the fact that he and his wife were both part Native American was never passed down in the oral traditions of the family.

You sure can't tell it by looking at me. I look like those Viking genes remained intact after landing in Scotland.

BWL must have had a good business at the rennaisance (spelling?) fair and is now too busy making more pots to BS with us.

Rapaire is probably in gaol after starting a sword fight with some one.

Either that, or they don't love us anymore.