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Dr. Ronald P. Rogers CHIROPRACTOR Support for your body's natural healing capabilities 270-384-5554 Click here for details 
  
Columbia Gas Dept. GAS LEAK or GAS SMELL Contact Numbers 24 hrs/ 365 days 270-384-2006 or 9-1-1 Call before you dig 
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Writer inspired to share Blair family lore and traditions "...Mother delighted in telling about the stockings she hated but that her mother insisted she wear. Every morning before arriving at school, Mama related, she'd stop, take off the stockings, and hide them in safe place, perhaps in hollow tree. Each afternoon, she'd put them back on before arriving at home..." By JIM Linda Waggener, I share your love of family history. Your recent comments about preserving that lore and tradition brought to mind a remote set of my forebears, James & Nancy Blair, late of the North Carolina Piedmont. In 1814, James & Nancy and their growing family departed the Tarheel State in search of a better life in the fabled land of Kaintuck. ("My dear honeys, heaven is a Kentucky of a place." - Variously ascribed, including Daniel Boone and Rev. Timothy Flint.) James & Nancy, then in their mid-thirties, had at least seven children in tow, the eldest fourteen or thereabout and the youngest, Burton, barely a year old. I've never been able to figure out if these hardy pioneers came overland, by water, or (more likely) a combination of the two, but imagine the grit, strength of will, and raw courage it took to set out on the three hundred mile sojourn from Burke County, North Carolina, to south-central Kentucky - a trek made without benefit of marked roads, rest stops, eateries, or even a comfy inn along the way at which a folksy-voiced spokesman had promised to leave on the light pending their arrival. Additionally, Nancy was with child during the journey; she delivered their son Morgan (who made a Baptist preacher, by the way) late in 1814. They first landed in Cumberland County, remaining some three years. Sometime around 1817, the family moved a few miles north into Adair County, and it was there in early 1820 that James & Nancy purchased from John & Mahala Wolford, the parents of Frank Lane Wolford, a 120 acre tract of land hard by the banks of Reynolds Creeks, and it was there they lived the rest of their lives, passing from this sphere of action in the 1860s. Humble hand-hewn markers note the location of their graves in the family cemetery started about 1825 or 1830 when their little daughter Mary died. In time, several more of their children and other descendants were interred there, including their son Larkin who passed as teenager in 1834. It was here also that James tilled the soil for some two-score trips around old Sol, and where the last several of their children were born and reared. In all, Nancy gave life to at least thirteen, probably fourteen, and possibly fifteen sons and daughters. The youngest, Emily, my ancestress (great-great-grandmother) graced the family shortly after New Year's 1826, not quite three months before the family found itself living in a new county, not by moving but rather, due to the formal creation of Russell County, mostly from Adair, on the first day of April that year. My mother, born in 1910, lived in the Blair Schoolhouse community of Russell County and received her education through eighth grade by walking to the nearby school located on land donated by James & Nancy's son Burton. (Mother delighted in telling about the stockings she hated but that her mother insisted she wear. Every morning before arriving at school, Mama related, she'd stop, take off the stockings, and hide them in safe place, perhaps in hollow tree. Each afternoon, she'd put them back on before arriving at home. Many years later, much to her amusement, she found out her oldest child, my brother, who had made the same trek many a day going to the same school, had loathed the galoshes she made him wear every bit as much as she'd hated her stockings - and had solved the problem in exactly the same manner.) In her later years, Mama vividly remembered from her youth seeing foundation rocks from the old Blair cabin as well as some of the packing crates (these at the home of her grandmother, a daughter of the aforementioned Emily) used by James & Nancy in transporting their worldly possessions to frontier Kentucky. Mother never had the opportunity to do any writing, but she often referenced, as casually as if she'd recently taken Sunday dinner with them, myriad long deceased uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents she'd known or heard about early in her life. In so doing, she instilled in her youngest son (who generally needed a thorough drowning at least twice a week) a love of things familial (and by extension, local history), and a curiosity-fueled itch for which the only poultice he's ever found is digging for -- and sometimes writing about -- "the rest of the story." This story was posted on 2016-10-16 13:28:45
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