Blue Highways: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

As we continue into North Carolina, William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) begins a quest to find information on family history, specifically his namesake William Trogdon, a patriot during the Revolutionary War.  We'll go along with him, and I'll look at more of my own search for my family history.  We'll also touch on Chapel Hill and its attractions.  Click on the map to see how far we've come!  Comments from readers are always welcome!

Book Quote

"As soon as I could, I took state 54 to Chapel Hill, a town of trees..."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 1

Downtown Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

The name of Chapel Hill draws up memories for me of watching March Madness college basketball when I was younger.  Every year, it seemed, the University of North Carolina was the team to beat and was in the Final Four.  I would agonize in the days before the shot clock when they got ahead and then put into practice their Four Corners offense, in which they would simply pass the ball around the corners and not take a shot for minutes at a time until the clock ran down.  They were the team I hated to see win.  Nowadays, they still field good teams, but my sports hatred in college basketball has switched to Duke, just down the road.

LHM simply stops in Chapel Hill to find a library to find information on his ancestor.  He describes it as a city of trees, but otherwise does not spend much time there to find out what the city is like or about.  In my search for information on my grandfather, which I started writing about in my last post, I did something similar.  While driving on a business trip from Milwaukee to the East Coast, I made a detour down to Akron, Ohio to see if I could find any information.  I remember it was a dark, rainy day as I found the main public library.  I went to Akron because my grandfather's death certificate said that he was born in Akron, so I tried to look up a birth record.  Unfortunately, I coudn't find one, and later learned that birth records were somewhat sketchy in the era in which my grandfather was born.  If a birth was in a hospital, there was a better chance of finding a birth record.  But if it was at home, there was practically no chance of tracking one down.  I also learned during this time how difficult it was (this was just before the Internet became really popular), to use census records.  They weren't indexed, just "soundex"ed.  In other words, you could find people whose last names began with "h" but they weren't alphabetized.

LHM was looking for information even earlier than I.  The internet was really a future dream at the time.  At least he was looking for someone who was considered a patriot.  If you try to find ordinary people, the run of the mill person who didn't really make a name for him or herself, the opportunities to find information about them were very limited.

Now, genealogical databases are everywhere on the internet, and some are enormous.  The biggest one on the internet is Ancestry.com, which has ties with the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints.  For a subscription, or even for free, you can find information on individuals past and present that past genealogists could only dream about.

I often wonder, now that everything is being digitized, stored on drives and discs, and fully accessible through databases, if anonymity is a thing of the past.  I can look up information about pretty much anyone I want.  Unless they are completely "off the grid," something will turn up.  Sometimes it is helpful information, sometimes embarrassing.  Totally by accident, for instance, as I was doing some research on Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) for my job on the internet, I happened across an arrest report of a person I know.  Should I have known about it?  The fact is that I might have never have learned about it if the internet didn't exist.  In some ways, knowing about the arrest puts the person in a different light for me and brought out an internal response of concern, but my awareness of the situation may be embarrassing to that person.

I'm not sure if access to so much information is a good thing.  I know that when I need such information, it is helpful to have it.  When I don't want the information, or I don't want people knowing mine, it is frightening to know that someone could get information that is embarrassing or inimical to my interests.  But I bet if William Least Heat-Moon had access to such information when he made his Blue Highways trip and stopped at a library in North Carolina town he called a city of trees, he would have probably had an easier time finding information on William Trogdon.

If you want to know more about Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill and Orange County Visitors Bureau
Chapel Hill Magazine Blog
Chapel Hill News and Advocate (newspaper)
Chapel Hill Watch (blog)
Independent Weekly (alternative weekly of Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill)
Town of Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Wikipedia: Chapel Hill

Next up:  Ramseur, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapAfter a long trip, we leave Tennessee and enter the state that was first in flight.  We are also just over 1000 miles from the start in Columbia, Missouri, and we move from Part 1, in which we were traveling east, to Part 2, in which the road in Blue Highways takes a southeasterly swing.  In this post we'll whip around Winston-Salem and Greensboro.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) doesn't have much to say about these two places as he doesn't pass through them on blue highways, but on the hated interstate.  However, he does start thinking about family history.  I will too.  Click on the map to see where these cities are situated.

Book Quote

"Blood.  It came to me that I had been generally retracing the migration of my white-blooded clan from North Carolina to Missouri, the clan of a Lancashireman who settled in the Piedmont in the eighteenth century...

"Highway 421 became I-85 and whipped me around Winston-Salem and Greensboro.  For a few miles I suffered the tyranny of the freeway and watched rear bumpers and truck mudflaps."

Blue Highways:  Part 2, Chapter 1

Downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina

This post is ostensibly about Winston-Salem and Greensboro.  Yet, as you may have learned, often my posts are not exactly about the places named.  When I read a book, places and images correspond to images and memories in my own life.  So in a sense, you are reading in this blog what I am thinking as I process those thoughts upon my own reading of Blue Highways.  LHM doesn't really say much about these places, and North Carolina is one of the ten or so states that I have never set foot in, so I don't have any experiences that I can add that would be of any value to you if you want to know more about these places.  I have assembled a few sites below so that you can explore for yourself.

The images that come to mind for me are located in the first part of the quote I cite above.  LHM realizes that he is tracing in reverse the route of his ancestors.  The search for one's roots has become very popular over the past few years, especially with the growth of the internet, which has allowed people to access each other's data and fill in gaps in history that may have existed for years.  Many people have become so good at finding bits of history and genealogical facts that they are almost like amateur family history detectives.

I became an unwitting beneficiary of this phenomena.  I'm going to touch on this story briefly and fill in gaps over the course of the next couple of posts.  The backstory is that I'm adopted, but I was always interested in solving a mystery about my adoptive father's own father.  We never knew much about him, and any records he might have had were lost in a fire.  His sons, my father and his brothers, never really knew much about his life prior to their births.  Their mother died when they were young, so they couldn't learn anything from her.  So, nobody knew where Marion came from, other than back east.

Occasionally, I would put his name into Google to see if anything would pop up.  There were mostly false leads, other people with his name that had no relation to the family.  But one day, about two years ago, I put his name in and got a hit.  Someone, in a genealogical database, had filled in his and his wife's name.  I contacted the person, and because she had an interest she embarked with me on a fact finding mission.  I filled in some gaps for her, and because she was passionate about geneaology, she was able to use those facts to find out more about my grandfather.  We learned that he apparently left a family behind in Ohio, came out to California, and married my grandmother and fathered my father and his brothers.  It was a sad story, because he left a fatherless child, Julian, behind.  I have recently made contact with a set of cousins in Ohio, descendents of Julian, a half-brother that my father and his brothers never knew they had.  Unfortunately, all of the brothers are now dead and never met each other.  But I was able to let my last surviving uncle know about all of this before he died, and my cousin let me know how much he appreciated my efforts to discover family history.

I still don't know what led my grandfather to leave a family, nor why he never told his sons about his past.  It all seems shrouded in mystery and pain and he apparently was not a happy person.  But a recent letter from one of my newly discovered cousins said that she hoped that old family wounds could be healed by this new contact.  I hope so too.

LHM, in his next couple of stops, will discover more about his own family history.  As an adoptee, I never really gave the importance of family history much consideration until recently, because my adopted family's history was never really my own.  I didn't know mine, that is, until I met my genealogical detective friend online.  I'll tell more about that as we move through the next posts.

For more about Winston-Salem and Greensboro, see below.  We're in tobacco country now, so you'll recognize some names.  Winston-Salem is the home of RJ Reynolds Tobacco, creator of some of the most recognizable brands of cigarettes.  Enjoy checking these places out!

Greensboro, North Carolina

If you want to know more about Winston-Salem and Greensboro

Dishing it Out (Winston-Salem food blog)
Downtown Winston-Salem (blog)
Eating Up Greensboro (Greensboro food blog)
Greensboring (blog)
Greensboro Convention and Visitors Bureau
Greensboro News-Record (newspaper)
Life in Forsyth (blog)
Salem College
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
University of North Carolina School of the Arts
Visit Winston-Salem
Wake Forest University
Wikipedia: Greensboro
Wikipedia: Winston-Salem
Winston-Salem (blog)
Winston-Salem Journal (newspaper)
Winston-Salem State University
Yes! Weekly (Greensboro alternative newspaper)

Next up: Chapel Hill, North Carolina