THE HOME PLACE by Jan Philpot, [email protected]

"I will neither look back, nor be back," were my grandfather's final words on an autumn day in 1967 as he gave up his last tenuous grasp on our family's ancestral home and lands in Land Between the Lakes (LBL), once known as Land Between the Rivers. It exists in Kentucky and Tennessee, and my family was among those who were forced to give up their ancestral home places when Lake Barkley, Kentucky Lake, and accompanying recreational lands were built. It was a very emotional time for many families, because lands that had been home for generations were taken, including family burial grounds, and because entire communities of people who had known each other for generations were closed, erased, as if they had never been. But it was inevitable, and of course the dams were needed. That day marked the end of a season in a family and it is one of the major reasons why I do what I do these days on the Net -- for myself and for others.

My cousin and I loved that home place dearly, as many of you loved a similar place that now exists only in your minds and hearts. I frequently "walk" through it, escaping today to yesterday and memories, willing myself to remember the touch of fabric, the coolness of hardwood floors on my bare feet, the weight of a fat white china cup in my hands, the way the afternoon sun slanted and cast shadows on the floor of a long front porch. Those memories are a comfort to me, because beyond the "things" I have that were there, they are all I have left of the place I knew. I know that many of you feel the same, and have another place you "walk" for comfort at times.

But those memories I have and you have will be gone all too soon, leaving this world at the same time that we do, just as the memories of our grandfathers and great-grandmothers left with them, and unless they are given and passed on, it is as if those things had never been other than what "facts" are left behind on scraps of paper.

This came to me in a very real way recently when the daughter of my first cousin (who is now gone to the next world) contacted me. A young mother, the family's heritage is beginning to be of importance to her. She asked for my memories, the memories her mother died before she could pass on, and so I have begun to write them for her and to give her what I cannot leave in any tangible form other than description. I have walked her through the family home place willing her to see through my eyes, and I have introduced her to the great-grandfather she never knew, trying to give her a balanced picture of him, the good and the bad, making him human and of breathing living flesh for her.

For the same reason, documenting the family line in that country is also important. I want to know who the grandparents of my grandfather were, because I have no memories of him telling me about them. I know he must have treasured memories of those who lived in his time, and I know he must have treasured the stories that he heard of those who did not. Because it was important to him, and knowing him, I know it was, it is also important to me. My grandfather was of another world and time, as many of yours were, and in that day and time the passing on of roots came through the oral tradition. They little understood that the coming ways of this world would leave little inclination or time for oral passing of roots and that unless a generation following them had the wisdom to record it, all was lost.

I rue that I was young when he sat so long talking his long tales of who begat whom and of things that had happened, where they happened, and those who peopled those stories. I am frustrated that I, as did his children, tuned much of this out. It is not just a matter of proving a lineage -- much more it is a matter of salvaging that which was important to one I loved and giving it to those like my cousin's children and my own children -- passing on the things that were of importance in an endless chain of loving memories. I cannot turn back the clock, and I cannot make my grandfather be here again with me at a time in which I am ready and mature enough now to listen to his endless stories that wound on hour after hour, but I still draw breath, and I can piece together what I can find, add to that what I do remember, and give the next generation something far more precious than the money this family never had would be anyway.

We no longer have our home in LBL, and even the family burial grounds where my great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and possibly before that are buried, have been taken from us. All we have is our history, and so you see why it is so important. It is all we have left of our roots. And I suspect that many of you, if for whatever reason your ancestral lands and home place are gone, feel the same.