Today I am not going to make my word count. In fact, I didn’t even open Ancestry.com to verify my facts. Instead, I played with Google Maps and information on flights. I looked a bed and breakfast my cousin found and spent all day emailing her with how we could make this trip.
Patty and I are planning a trip to the places I have only been writing about. We are planning to meet the people who are family that we don’t know. We are hoping to find the old house or at least the property where our grandfather grew up. We want to go and visit Martha Jane and Grandpa’s brothers who are buried there too.
We want to take in the surroundings and breathe the air that they did. Patty lives in the San Francisco area and I am in Southern California. We have trees and very large mountains but the Appalachians are foreign to us. We want to see the Clinch River where it climbed the banks on the crops.
We want to see the town where they would have gone for supplies and gatherings. We want to see our grandfather’s life in a way that we can’t on paper. It is a time for discovery. While we may not learn any more about Martha Jane, we can learn about her through her surroundings.
The Rhea’s have lived in the bit of country for a very long time. According to some records, they were the second family that settled in Sneedville.
Besides, we just found a quilting trail. That’s all I need to know!
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