Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I realized today that I had a small part of trying to illustrate how complicated kinships here are, right here on the farm.

My herd sires, Leonard and Beacon are half-brothers sharing a sire.

BossyToe and Bridey are half-sisters sharing Leonard as their sire.

BossyToe and two of the Triplets are half-sisters and the Triplets are BossyToe's aunties since BossyToe's mom was also the Triplets' mom's daughter. Violette's sire is obviously Beacon, so she is merely BossyToe's auntie.

It is about at this point that my head starts pounding. What do you call a sister/aunt anyway?

It does get confusing when I try to explain how Friend Scott is related to everyone. So, in interest of brevity, I just refer to everyone as "cousin". It's so much easier than saying "great-aunt once removed bar sinister with ice cream on top." And it certainly stops the headache I get from trying to actually track back to get that term.

You would think it would be pretty easy for me since I come from a family with multiple generations of DAR and SAR members carrying up to 20 bars on their DAR pins. I spent many hours in the South Carolina State Archives as a college student doing research for my mother. By the time I hit twenty, I was swinging through the branches of my family tree like a agile little genealogy monkey. But it is much harder here.

Betsy likes to say that it's "line-breeding" when it works and "in-breeding" when it doesn't. This is a fairly familiar concept in livestock husbandry. "Line-breeding" involves breeding related livestock to extract the best physical/temperamental traits from a particular line of animals. "In-breeding" is when that goes horribly awry and you end up with a kid with one eye in the middle of its forehead.

It is a bit tricky honestly discussing in-breeding in these small Appalachian communities. It is a pervasive negative stereotype. People automatically assume incest is prevalent. It happens here, but no more so than in any other insular hyper-religious community. More common is intermarriage between cousins. Scott's parents were first cousins who did not discover their family relationship until after they married. Since the Appalachian folk have a history of moving around, this is quite common. And the gene pool was a great deal smaller in days gone by. As recently as 20 years ago, some of the folk here lived their entire lives without ever visiting the closest town only 20 miles away.

So Scott has many double cousins.

I think the lesson of line-breeding here applies in many cases. Those huge, lovely sloe-eyes that you see once in a while that always seem to be laughing. Their amazing determination and resourcefulness. I can't say they have bred much for temperament here...they are all as stubborn, thin-skinned and feisty as their Scots/Irish ancestors. But most of the time they are the soul of kindness.

But when you start to see those pretty sloe-eyes...it's usually a sign that it's time to change the herd sire. It's not going to get much prettier than that, and it could get a good deal uglier.