All about Food

I was reading the article in the NYTimes today, On Lenten Fridays in New Orleans, the Catfish Are Making the Sacrifices and it made me think of the fish fries in Alabama I’ve been to and how food can symbolize a place and a time and often a tradition that runs deep in your family.

The first time I visited my father’s family in Talladega, Alabama in 1982, the trip ended with a big fish fry at my uncle’s gas station/store. The whole family was there–and when I say that about this family, I easily mean 50 people or more. The deep fryers were outside and catfish that various uncles and cousins caught were being fried alongside hush puppies. Inside were platters  of cole slaw, potato salad and big styrofoam cups of icey sweet tea. One of the rooms in the back of the store had been set-up with amps, a drum kit, microphones; folks showed up with guitars, ready to sing. The music was decidedly gospel and it was the first time I heard my grandmother sing “I’ll Fly Away”  in her distinctive alto voice. I grew up just outside Boston, I’d never experienced anything like this. Once back home, fried catfish, hushpuppies and even a can of Dr. Pepper brought a little bit of Alabama.

Frying catfish at a gospel singing in Clay County.

In subsequent trips, I’ve been to different fish fries. We drove out on a hot day, to a church in rural Clay County to hear my aunts and cousin at a Gospel Singing. Off behind the speakers, men were frying mud cat that the preacher had caught that week in a big old iron pot over an open flame.  It tasted more earthy than any catfish I’d ever had. It came with the requisite hush puppies, slaw and sweet tea which we ate, listening to gospel and trying to stay out of the really hot sun.

There have been other fish fries at my grandmother’s church and there’s always music. There have also been backyard meals filled with mac & cheese, butter beans, mustard and collard greens, fried and regular corn bread, bbq chicken, fried green tomatoes, okra, biscuits, black eyed peas, and red velvet, 7-up, and coca cola cakes. And huge styrofoam or plastic cups of ice for soda or sweet tea.

I suppose this is similar to what I was talking about in the post The History You Can Touch. Once in Alabama, I sat with my dad and his cousin while they ate fried and boiled chitlins, they reminisced over a time when your house would be filled with the horrible smell of chitlins being cleaned and cooked. A time when you ate chitlins because you wouldn’t waste one bit of the pig; so history pops up around the supper table just like it does in the cemetery or in the library.

Food connects me to my family, their culture, traditions and history–at rural Alabama fish fries, but also at Armenian Church dinners in East Watertown, MA and the Pennsylvania German farmer’s markets in York, PA. Which means I’ll be writing soon enough about lamejun, kufte, metch and then hog maw, german bologna and big tins of Utz potato chips and pretzels!

The history you can touch

Tangible history is always interesting to check out when doing genealogical research. By “tangible history”, I mean the street your great-grandparent’s lived on, the house your 3rd great-grandfather built, the land they worked, or even just going to the town ancestors lived in to see the same mountain tops in the distance that they saw every day.

The access to this kind of history is vastly different depending on which side of my family I’m researching. My father’s family has been in Alabama since the early 1800s, for the most part in the same county. They moved around a lot, so there’s no family homestead to go back and see. When I go to Alabama to visit family, I’ve never been able to drive around with my notes to different roads and towns to check out where my family used to live.

One exception was when I drove  to an old cemetery in Sylacauga with my dad, his brother and his uncle. It was off of a main road and up a small windy hill.  On the way up, we drove near where my grandmother had lived when she was young–a much more rural or country-looking place than I had seen before.  The cemetery was a small hanging-moss-covered cemetery. We had to push branches out of our way as we walked to my great-great grandparent’s grave (to the right).  My uncle remembered that my great-great grandfather used to smoke Prince Albert Tobacco from a tin and that he had lost an arm in the cotton mill. I had never heard these stories, but being there prompted them.

It was definitely a rare moment for my father’s side of the family.

My experience on my mother’s side is nearly the opposite.  Right now, my parents live close enough to walk to the cemetery where my great-grandmother is buried.  I’ve visited at least once a year for my entire life.  The first house my Armenian great-grandparents lived in when they came to Watertown from Syria (via New Hampshire) is still standing and I’ve been by it many times. I’ve walked on the streets they walked on. I know the view they had from their front porch. I didn’t have to conduct research to hear stories about this side of the family–they were all round me. Seeing these pieces of history, always prompted stories, like they did in Alabama. The difference here is that it happened often, so I have more stories and anecdotes to fill in for the 10 years between each census record I transcribe.

It’s always worth it to make the trip to the places where your ancestors lived; at least it has been for me.


I have a pretty big love for Ireland, it’s people, music and literature. It has nothing to do with my ancestry, it just is. In fact, I’ve always assumed I don’t have anything beyond a drop of Irish blood.  As I learn more about my ancestors, while that may still be true, I’m also pointed toward a people I had never thought much about: the Scots-Irish.

It’s silly that I hadn’t thought of them before as half of my family has been in one or another part of Appalachia since the 1700s and 90% of the early settlers of Appalachia were Scots-Irish; it only makes sense.

So how did I realize this? I was searching back on my dad’s side through the Rayfields, Martins, Robersons and then I hit the Boggs family. As I started to research a distant great-grandfather, Samuel Boggs, I started to find others who had already done a lot of research. Many of them made mention of an old family story of how the Boggs’ got their name.

The story goes: John Livingstone was born in Linlithgow, Scotland and he was a Presbyterian. When Oliver Cromwell was made Protector  by Charles II in Britain, he began rooting out the Presbyterians (Charles II was Episcopalian) and many were exiled to Northern Ireland.  Brothers John and Hugh Livingstone ended up in Londonderry, Northern Ireland and took the surname Boggs. John’s son James Boggs came from Londonderry in 1724 with his ten children to New Castle, Delaware. The family ended up in an area of South Carolina called Long Cane . Samuel Boggs married Mary Campbell, also of Scots-Irish descent.

Now I’m not sure if the Livingstone/Boggs story is true–there’s really no documented proof. What is true is that I trace back to James Boggs who did indeed come from Londonderry, Ireland during a mass migration of Scots-Irish from Northern Ireland to the US.  For the next several generations, the family stay in the Long Cane or Abbeville County area of SC and married into other known Scots-Irish families: Roberson, Clackler, Martin and Henderson.

The Scots-Irish mainly originate in the Lowlands of Scotland or the border towns in Northern England. People in Ireland would think of them as Ulster Scots. Now that I look at all of the surnames in a row, they actually sound Scottish to me. I always just assumed they were English, but now I’m thinking again.