Carry Me Back: An American Journey in Time and Place

This is a book about seeking ancestry and about the bond and mystery of time and place. For over 50 years the author has been engaged in a love affair with the legends surrounding his family history as it unfolded in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Berryville, Clarke County, Virginia. As a child growing up in an idyllic neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut, during the early 1950s, he was beguiled by these legends filled with emotional tales of landscape, tradition and people. To heighten his interest, there was an old trunk in his attic that had been shipped North in the 1930s when the last family members to live in Berryville died. The trunk was filled with photographs and memorabilia of Clarke County, Virginia, the antebellum South, the Confederacy, Methodism and American small town southern life. As he grew older and moved beyond the mysteries and emotions that all of this evoked, many other questions began to arise, such as how his family dealt with the larger issues of slavery and American apartheid. He began to ask what it was that they, as Confederates and Methodists, actually believed and how did their circumstances parallel American history itself. Thus began a 50-year search to rediscover these people, the time and place in which they lived, and what that place is like today. This book is their story. Fifty years out from the New Haven neighborhood where the story begins, an afterword details how time transformed that charmed neighborhood into one of the most dangerous and crime-ridden in the state, offering yet another example of the evolution of American place. Over the years, the author was to learn that his own family history was really a prototype of American history and that we are all connected to our past in a myriad of ways that decades cannot erase. He discovered that sometimes memories get twisted and sometimes the past is elusive. But to live again in its enclosure can be one of the most enriching and enlightening experiences that life has to offer.