Who are everywhere? Cousins!
At the age of 60, in 2007, I decided to go back to college. I wanted to do some genealogy research into the families of St. Augustine, Florida, which is about 36 miles from my house. I knew my high school Spanish from all those decades ago would not be sufficient to understand and translate the documents I would encounter. I ended up with a double post-baccalaureate major in Spanish and history. And in one of those Spanish classes, there was a fine bear of a young man. He sat on the opposite side of the classroom from me.
The discussion was about kinship, in a broad sense, and our professor, Dr. Jorge Febles, used an expression that did not translate well in the literal sense into English. I got the drift, however, and was about to give the English equivalent that Dr. Febles was asking us for: The apple don't fall far from the tree, a phrase taught to me by a dear friend from the Appalachians. Before I could say it, the phrase came from the bear of a young man, whose surname was Bowers.
After class, I said to him, "You're from the Appalachians, aren't you?"
"Yes, ma'am, I shore am," he said.
I asked him if he had any kin of a certain surname, and he said he didn't think so. When I got home, I called my friend from the Appalachians, Amanda, thinking young Bowers might be related to her. I asked her if she had any Bowers people in her lineage. She didn't think so.
The next week, I received in the mail a book I had been waiting for -- Teter Nave, East Tennessee Pioneer: His Ancestors and Descendants, by Robert T. Nave and Margaret W. Houghland. I was eager to look for my Nave kin, my mother's line, and I found a great-great grandfather whose name startled me: John Teter Bowers Nave. Maybe it wasn't Amanda young Bowers was related to. Maybe it was me.
The next class, I told young Bowers about my great-grandfather John Teter Bowers Nave, and he said, "Oh, yeah, we've got Teters and Naves all over the family!"
Lately, I had found indications that I was related to the famous Carter family of country music, both to Maybelle Addington Carter, the "Mother Maybelle" of the Carter Family Singers, and to her brother-in-law Alvin Pleasant Dulaney (A. P.) Carter, leader of the troupe, country music songwriter, and "song-catcher" of the Appalachian Mountains. My friend Amanda has connections to that family, and it made me grin at the idea that we might be cousins.
And indeed we are -- 16th cousins once removed.
Next year, it will be forty years I've known Amanda. Never, until the recent revelations, did I suspect we may be kin.
Tread softly, friends. You never know. That stranger sitting next to you in the theater might be your cousin.
