Jan 05 2009
Voices from the Past
My Great-Aunt Alice, before her death in 1997, sat down with me to relate a story her step-grandfather, Daniel Alexander Watson (my great-great-grandfather), had told her as a little girl. It was a family story, really, and one I had heard rumors of, but had never had a chance to hear the full of it.
When Daniel was about my own son’s age, his father, James Watson, was killed in a feud with the Hooper family at their residence in Jackson County, North Carolina. Daniel’s mother took him and his three siblings back home to South Carolina, where she and the youngest, an infant at the time of James’s death, died and were buried. A more detailed account of the Watson - Hooper Feud is on my web site.
One day, while looking for something totally unrelated, I stumbled upon transcriptions of letters written to James, one from his wife, Elizabeth, and one from Alfred Wilson, who must’ve been a friend of the family. Finding those letters was a huge surprise, but a welcome one. Because of the time period in which this family lived, I never thought to find any personal effects. Even still, it isn’t often that we are privileged to personally witness our ancestor’s viewpoint, to hear one’s voice come to life. This one rang out from across a 133-year gap in time and spoke clearly of a woman concerned about the state of her family and day-to-day life in a world touched by war.
The lesson here is that we should never stop looking for further information on our families; we should always keep our eyes and ears open to the possibility that something great is waiting for us to find.
If you’d like to read those letters, visit the Photographs & Civil War Letters collection at Hunter Library on the campus of Western Carolina University.
