Where
I’m From
There is a swing on my back porch built
by my husband’s grandfather. It is my favorite place to sit when the early
morning light touches the mountains behind my house, and the mist hangs over
their peaks like white lacy shawls. From my perch, I can watch the sun climb
high into the sky and burn the mist away, revealing the deep greenness that is
cooling to my eyes. As the swing dips to and fro, I marvel that these mountains
are my home.
My
corner of Appalachia is southwestern Virginia, where the rugged mountains soar
high into the sky. In spring and summer, they vibrate with green, but in the
fall, they transform into a kaleidoscope of color. Man cannot duplicate the
gilded color of the autumn leaves – saffron and sunflower yellows, russet and
chestnut browns, and my favorite, reds that range from crimson to oxblood.
Like
many of the people in these mountains, my family has lived here for generations,
and we claim Ulster Scots’ ancestry. Our descendants were the people who left
their homes in Northern Ireland and the lowlands of Scotland during the Great
Migration that took place during the eighteenth century. Most Ulster Scots came
first to Pennsylvania and as the land opportunities dried up, they migrated
down into Virginia, some traveling into southwestern Virginia, western North
Carolina, and eastern Tennessee and beyond. They were almost exclusively
protestant Presbyterians looking for the opportunity to own land, and even
though farming the rocky ridges of southwestern Virginia was a daunting task,
it was far better than what they had left behind.
The Ulster Scots,
or the Scotch-Irish as they are usually called, brought more than their religion
to Appalachia. Our traditional speech was influenced by the Scotch-Irish
emigrants, and not the result of Elizabethan England influence. Growing up, I
heard the Ulster-Scots influence on our language every day. My parents used the
adjective “airish,” meaning windy and chilly, and they also warned me of
“taking a backset,” a reversal of health, when they didn’t think I was taking
care of myself after a cold or the flu. Both of those terms are Scotch-Irish as
is “you’uns,” a contraction of “you” and “ones,” also seen in “young’un and
big’uns.” Those words are just as much a part of central Appalachian culture as
is our love of helping verbs and prepositions, also a result of our
Scotch-Irish heritage. In Appalachia you may hear, ‘I was wondering if you
“might could” help me?’ and ‘I “used to could” or “you might could.” You will
also hear, “it’s a quarter “till” three” instead of the more traditional “it’s
a quarter to three.” I recently heard a grandmother try to convince her
grandson, who was sitting under a table in McDonalds, to come out. Apparently,
he did not want to leave, and all of her attempts to convince him had failed. I
walked up just as she said this preposition riddled sentence, ‘I said for you to get back up and out from
under in there!’
In southwestern
Virginia and other parts of Appalachia, our Scotch-Irish heritage influences
the pronunciation of numerous words. I, myself, can’t distinguish between the
pronunciation of “i” and “e” in words like “pin/pen, tin/ten, and bit/bet,” to
the extent that I would have to see the written word before I could distinguish
the meaning. Even our southern drawl with
its love of stretching out vowels in short words like bad/ba-ud and bed/be-ud
is attributed to our Ulster-Scots ancestors. After all, in NASCAR we don’t race
cars, but rather we race ca-urs.
The people of
central Appalachia have inherited more from the Ulster-Scots than religion and
language. Numerous surnames native to southwestern Virginia are western
European (England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales) in origin, and are more telling
of a person’s heritage than the blue eyes and red hair that favor so many of
our residents. Often, Ulster-Scots’ emigrants changed their names to a more traditional
spelling, an example being dropping the “O, Mc, Mac” part of the surname. “O”
is really a word all by itself, it means "grandson". Only in recent years has it been attached to
the surname with an apostrophe. “Mac” is the Gaelic word for son. It is now often abbreviated to "Mc.” Many
surnames common to southwestern Virginia are Ulster-Scots in origin. Blackburn
is commonplace and is found in several places in Scotland’s Lowlands, including
Berwickshire, Sterlingshire, and Edinburgh. In Ulster many Blackburns claim the
Sterlingshire decent. (ancestry.com)
On a recent trip
to Ireland, I visited the Aran Islands, population approximately two hundred.
Our tour guide mentioned there were only nine surnames on the island and
rattled them off. When he said Mullins, I said, “Wait! Did you say Mullins?
There are a lot of Mullins where I live.” At first, I don’t think he believed
me, and then he joked, “One bloke must have gotten in a boat because Mullins
have lived on this island for centuries.” Other common Scotch-Irish surnames prevalent
in southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, southern West Virginia, and
eastern Kentucky are Thompson, Sullivan, Horn, Ward, and my great-grandmother’s
surname Williams, first recorded in Rockbridge County, Virginia. (ancestry.com)
A lifelong
resident of southwestern Virginia, I have experienced the religious fervor,
clannish behavior, and fierce almost feudal behavior of protecting the family
that is part of our Ulster Scots heritage. I know families with Scotch-Irish
surnames who have lived in the same hollows in central Appalachia for more than
two hundred years, and I have studied the Ulster Scots influence on our
language. Even the mountain people’s love of moonshine came about because of the
Scotsman’s’ and Irishman’s’ love for and lack of whiskey. (This American liquor
made from corn is even more potent in its effect than true Scotch or Irish
whiskey.) We still eat traditional Scotch-Irish foods like mashed potatoes and
cabbage, and the ballads they brought from home are still sung here. We have
their love of music and dance, and the roots of our blue grass music are in Ireland,
Scotland, and England. Even our superstitions and belief in spirits can be
traced to the Ulster Scots. They believed in fairies, goblins and ghosts and
these beliefs crossed the Atlantic with them. It is from these immigrants that came
the saying of “God bless you” when someone sneezes – done to ward off the evil
spirits, of course.
Nestled in these
mountains, the Ulster Scots legacy has been preserved for centuries, but now, the
modern world penetrates this fortress that once was only trespassed by the brave
pioneers. As I admire them from my back porch swing, I realize these mountains have
changed and will continue to change, and it is up to people like me to preserve
our heritage by seeking out and writing down the stories of our ancestors.
Works
Cited
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