Visiting our past: Grandma's stories sparked love of family history
Here's how history and folk tales converge: When a family member wants to pass along information to descendants, it's often best preserved as a story. The facts might or might not be enhanced.
The narrative, elaboration or not, is the bottle used to send a message to the generations to come. The bottle makes the story float.
Dawn Jiles-McCall's 658-page genealogical work, "The Descendants of Captain Edmund Sams of Buncombe County," includes painstaking research, suppositions and lore, duly noted as such. Facts and oral history are not mutually exclusive.
Jiles-McCall first got her history from a fairy-tale-like situation. Her maternal grandmother, Jessie Leona Merrell Jiles, adopted her as an infant and raised her in her Etowah home, which lacked running water and a telephone, as well as electricity in all but one room.
Once a month, on a church day, Jessie took Dawn to see Jessie's aunts in Asheville and Leicester. It involved a trip to a family graveyard. And about once a month, Jessie sat down with little Dawn and went through her box of photographs.
"Grandma was proud to be descended from the Merrells, Boyds and Sams," Jiles-McCall notes.
Captain Benjamin Merrell, a prosperous Yadkin River Valley planter, was hanged as a Regulator by Governor Tryon in 1771 after the Battle of Alamance. Captain Edmund Sams, Jessie's mother's mother's ancestor, was Buncombe County's first coroner.
But Jessie, though intelligent and resourceful, was poor. She supplied Dawn with clothes from the Lions' Club. She enrolled Dawn in Head Start, for which Jessie drove the van, and where Dawn got a good meal each day.
Jessie's parents, George and Wrinda Boyd Merrell, weren't well-off. George was the only child of William Merrell and Jessie West, a descendant of Sir Thomas West, the second Lord Delaware. Jessie West died two years after her only child was born. William quickly remarried, and George became the lone stepchild in a large family.
When George married Wrinda — a love match, Dawn says — his outsider status was reinforced, Dawn believes, because of the difference in social status.
In raising Dawn, Jessie Jiles was no coddler, but she was a romantic. From her days as a USO hostess during World War II, she saved many 78 rpm records and played them frequently, interrupted by "General Hospital" and "The Price Is Right" on her small TV.
"Your ancestors, the Merrells, came into South Carolina and had their own ships," Jessie recounted to Dawn during one of their sit-downs.
Jiles-McCall has discovered no basis for that statement. But she has discovered that, in all probability, the pioneer ancestor of her mother, Wrinda Boyd, whose humble farming background had apparently disenchanted her father's family, did come in his own boat.
"There is a ship record of a ship owned by Boyds leaving Ireland, setting sail for Charleston at the time of my ancestor's arrival," Jiles-McCall says. "However, I don't know if they're my Boyds."
Regarding the history of princely ancestors and displaced heirs in Dawn's family, she says, "I have a lot of important people in my ancestry, yet (the legacy) trickled down to one common, ordinary person who had an extraordinary mind, and that was my grandmother."
Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" history column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. The column originally was published May 31, 2010.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting our past: Grandma's stories sparked love of family history
