The Greatest Show on Earth
Happy New Year near ones and dear ones near and far
I have danced around the idea of doing a family history research blog on the Orr and Nance families for some time now. My procrastination has been a result of the fear that none of you would care about any of this information. My fear may turn out to be true but you all been very much with me this past week. Both my cousin Bill Orr and his father, Steve the elder, observed birthdays (12/23 and 12/31, respectively.) Yeehah--happy birthday guys! But this holiday period also marked out first Christmas without Fred and I felt the pain of his absence intensely, as I'm sure everybody else did as well. Even if I didn't see him over any particular Christmas week, I always knew that he was either in Atlanta or basking on some beach somewhere or with some kid and their family somewhere. So I decided that it was crucial to launch this blog missile into the universe this week, both to celebrate us as a group and to forever ensure Fred's place with us.
To that end, I have come across yet another vault of photos that need to see daylight but, please, they do not need to see Facebook. I am not convinced that Steve Z. does not own the rights to any and all content on Facebook and while I'm relieved that we don't have any bra and panty shots posted, I am concerned about the family artifacts we already have posted there. So I plan to keep this blog private, limited only to immediate and extended family, and in that spirit I offer up these treasures that have been hidden away for years. Actually, I just forgot that Kay passed them to me but, thankfully, I came across them again recently.
In short, I decided that this was the right time to honor our particular clan and the Nance-Orr tribe in general. I have been researching my great-grandfather Alexander Stephens Nance since 1988 when his daughter, my grandmother, Cynthia Nance Orr first showed me an original clipping of his 1938 obituary. Within twenty-four hours, I was glued to a microfilm reader at the Georgia State University library. Seemingly simultaneously, my mother, Kay Orr-Goetz, found a copy of CIO organizer Lucy Randolph Mason's autobiography To Win These Rights in a used book store in Florida. Lucy discussed her friendship with Grandaddy Nance at length, her grief over his death from which she never fully recovered, and their work together from 1936-1938 for the CIO's Textile Workers' Organizing Committee trying to unionize the textile workers of the deep South in the face of business, law enforcement, media, church, local community and, yes, even Ku Klux Klan resistance. More about all of that later. Let's just say that Granddaddy and his staff were incredibly brave and determined men and women, as or more brave (dare I say it?) than the later fighters of the 1960s civil rights movement many of whom were trained in organizing and non-violent resistance techniques at The Highlander Folk School in Tennessee by several of Granddaddy's former proteges who began their labor activist careers under his personal tutelage during the early TWOC campaign of the late 1930s. Needless to say, A. Steve Nance's life and career hooked my interest that morphed into an obsession that has lured me on for these past twenty-three years.
The "magnificant obsession" spawned both my B.A. and M.A. theses which focused on his life and work. There is now a collection of his papers at the Georgia State University Labor Archives, donated in the Nance family name, where before there had been nothing that documented his herculean work in the southern labor community of the 1920s and 1930s. Bob Dinwiddie, one of the founding archivists at the GSU labor repository's inception actually visited my Great-grandmother Frances McMurtrey Nance at her home in 1969 to beg, unsuccessfully, for any papers relating to Granddaddy's work. Bob told me in 1988 that Granddaddy had been the most significant labor figure in the South during the 1930s depression/New Deal era and that he was THE missing link in their collection of primary documents at that point. Well, Granddaddy is absent no more from the GSU collection but Bob has moved on and the younger crop of archivists seem to have a dimmer understanding of 1930s southern labor history. When my cousin Julie Orr Franklin recently tried to donate some newly found documents pertaining to Granddaddy Nance's work, she found the archivist, ahem, less than excited by her offer and was told that they already had a collection on him, meaning I suppose that they didn't need any thing more. Quite a change from the greeting I received in the late '80s, not to mention just bad historical practice on the part of the archivist. Sorry for the ramble....you can probably tell I've done a bit of studying on Granddaddy Nance and his times.
A few years ago, I discovered Ancestry.com and my obsession with A. Steve Nance quickly ventured into the much larger stories of the Nance and Orr families. The research possibilities are vast and unending and I gradually began to see both of these families as truly fascinating. That is NOT my bias speaking....our families have spit out some amazing people. Granddaddy Nance is by no means alone in his admirable uniqueness. There is no question that family history research is addictive and can become something of a life's work. It does for many folks and it's usually confined to one particularly obsessive person in the family, which also means that it gets LONELY. For instance I have noticed that when I start rambling ad nauseum about dates long ago, obscure places, who married who and who was the great-great-great nephew of Davy Crockett or some other fascinating tidbit, SOME of you first get this glazed look in your eyes and then start looking around the room inventorying your small appliances. I think that my aunt, Jo Brachman, who has been an intellectual partner and co-conspirator in most things throughout my life, once even slipped into a benign coma or maybe it was just a dissociative state while I was holding forth about some branch of our family tree.
As a result of such reactions, sorry Jo, I've learned not to belabor the begats but to TRY to keep it light and give you guys only the more interesting stories and necessary details. That, at least, is my goal with this blog. I plan to keep it private, circulated only among family members and in-laws who can claim a bona fide connection to our Nance or Orr family trees. Over time, you will no doubt see posts or comments from folks you don't recognize. Please ask who they are and reach out to them....I've met a number of distant cousins, or spouses of cousins who are the researchers in their families, via Ancestry and other genealogical sites, boards, groups, or just by accident. They are wonderful folks and have great information or materials to add to what hopefully will be a fun and illuminating conversation between all of us about the ones who came before.
I have found the study of our family's history to be both healing of some old hurts and life-changing in a wonderful way. I am often moved, impressed and amazed by our ancestors. Their lives were harder beyond imagination than our own and yet they loved, played, laughed, worked like dogs, had children in numbers that now make national news and endured incredible losses that would find me drooling and singing nursery rhymes to myself in some unknown hospital. Nances and Orrs have fought and sometimes died in every war in American history until Vietnam. It would seem that once the draft ended, our branch of the family realized that we were pretty smart folks and could go do other things. Needless to say, I have conflicted feelings about this. I'm married to a veteran and I have friends whose kids are in the military or off in Iraq or Afghanistan today. I think we've followed the spiritual pull to service in other ways, for sure, but there is an element of sacrifice and debt to our elders that we've lost. They lived full lives, full of grandparents, parents, siblings, children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors. A number of them were quite accomplished in their own time. They were all thoroughly embedded in their culture and history and, as such, were at times heroic, sometimes were typical, and at times did things far differently than we would have. It's knowing about our elders as individual people and their activities that's made family history research so liberating for me. We are both connected to many, many unknown others in the present and are part of some very large tribes that extend back in time much further than I, for one, have ever known or pondered.
So what do ya'll think? Should I keep going with this? Now that I've proven I can keep my comments brief (ha!), is it interesting enough to compel your participation or are you counting your appliances? Let me know only after you've read today's list of factoids:
1. We've always known that Granddaddy Orr's brother, Howard, died in World War II, but did you know that Howard served in the 62nd Chemical Unit? I have searched for information on said unit, but to no avail at this point. Does anybody know anything about it?
2. Granddaddy Nance's father was an avid genealogist himself and passed it to Granddaddy Nance, etc. John Lipscomb Nance, get used to it---Granddaddy Nance's father, gleaned from a genealogy column in the Atlanta paper that Nances descended from the French Huguenots, 200,000 of whom scattered across the map in all directions to escape religious persecution from French Catholics between 1600-1700. Remember the Reformation and that little Catholic-Protestant spat? There is evidence that we came down that path but I haven't substantiated it yet.
3. Why was Great-grandmother Brooks' second husband referred to only as "Uncle Will?" Was he related to the Orrs somehow or to her Hendrix people? Steve, what's the story?
4. Speaking of Grandmother Brooks, one of her mother's ancestors led the push to establish Buncombe County, North Carolina as a distinct county in 1792. In fact, the meeting to sign the county's charter was held in the guy's barn. For those of you not in the know, Buncombe Co., N.C. includes Asheville, to which area several of us seem inexplicably drawn.
5. BTW, the oldest home in Asheville to this day belonged to Grandmother Brooks' mother's family. It was a hotel and is now on the National Historical Register with its own plaque outside and everything. Quick, somebody grab a
6. And finally, since it is Christmas week, I think we should also remember Nancy Christmas Nance, Granddaddy Nance's aunt, who was born December 25, 1841 and died February 19, 1924. She is buried as Nancy Vinesett (next to her third husband) in Gaffney, South Carolina, a nearby suburb of (hmmmm...) Spartanburg, South Carolina and not that far from Julie in Greenville. Nancy had 3 husbands, 15 children (within marriage) and is rumored to have had 2 or 3 more outside the bonds of matrimony. And we thought nobody had fun back then...
To that end, I have come across yet another vault of photos that need to see daylight but, please, they do not need to see Facebook. I am not convinced that Steve Z. does not own the rights to any and all content on Facebook and while I'm relieved that we don't have any bra and panty shots posted, I am concerned about the family artifacts we already have posted there. So I plan to keep this blog private, limited only to immediate and extended family, and in that spirit I offer up these treasures that have been hidden away for years. Actually, I just forgot that Kay passed them to me but, thankfully, I came across them again recently.
In short, I decided that this was the right time to honor our particular clan and the Nance-Orr tribe in general. I have been researching my great-grandfather Alexander Stephens Nance since 1988 when his daughter, my grandmother, Cynthia Nance Orr first showed me an original clipping of his 1938 obituary. Within twenty-four hours, I was glued to a microfilm reader at the Georgia State University library. Seemingly simultaneously, my mother, Kay Orr-Goetz, found a copy of CIO organizer Lucy Randolph Mason's autobiography To Win These Rights in a used book store in Florida. Lucy discussed her friendship with Grandaddy Nance at length, her grief over his death from which she never fully recovered, and their work together from 1936-1938 for the CIO's Textile Workers' Organizing Committee trying to unionize the textile workers of the deep South in the face of business, law enforcement, media, church, local community and, yes, even Ku Klux Klan resistance. More about all of that later. Let's just say that Granddaddy and his staff were incredibly brave and determined men and women, as or more brave (dare I say it?) than the later fighters of the 1960s civil rights movement many of whom were trained in organizing and non-violent resistance techniques at The Highlander Folk School in Tennessee by several of Granddaddy's former proteges who began their labor activist careers under his personal tutelage during the early TWOC campaign of the late 1930s. Needless to say, A. Steve Nance's life and career hooked my interest that morphed into an obsession that has lured me on for these past twenty-three years.
The "magnificant obsession" spawned both my B.A. and M.A. theses which focused on his life and work. There is now a collection of his papers at the Georgia State University Labor Archives, donated in the Nance family name, where before there had been nothing that documented his herculean work in the southern labor community of the 1920s and 1930s. Bob Dinwiddie, one of the founding archivists at the GSU labor repository's inception actually visited my Great-grandmother Frances McMurtrey Nance at her home in 1969 to beg, unsuccessfully, for any papers relating to Granddaddy's work. Bob told me in 1988 that Granddaddy had been the most significant labor figure in the South during the 1930s depression/New Deal era and that he was THE missing link in their collection of primary documents at that point. Well, Granddaddy is absent no more from the GSU collection but Bob has moved on and the younger crop of archivists seem to have a dimmer understanding of 1930s southern labor history. When my cousin Julie Orr Franklin recently tried to donate some newly found documents pertaining to Granddaddy Nance's work, she found the archivist, ahem, less than excited by her offer and was told that they already had a collection on him, meaning I suppose that they didn't need any thing more. Quite a change from the greeting I received in the late '80s, not to mention just bad historical practice on the part of the archivist. Sorry for the ramble....you can probably tell I've done a bit of studying on Granddaddy Nance and his times.
A few years ago, I discovered Ancestry.com and my obsession with A. Steve Nance quickly ventured into the much larger stories of the Nance and Orr families. The research possibilities are vast and unending and I gradually began to see both of these families as truly fascinating. That is NOT my bias speaking....our families have spit out some amazing people. Granddaddy Nance is by no means alone in his admirable uniqueness. There is no question that family history research is addictive and can become something of a life's work. It does for many folks and it's usually confined to one particularly obsessive person in the family, which also means that it gets LONELY. For instance I have noticed that when I start rambling ad nauseum about dates long ago, obscure places, who married who and who was the great-great-great nephew of Davy Crockett or some other fascinating tidbit, SOME of you first get this glazed look in your eyes and then start looking around the room inventorying your small appliances. I think that my aunt, Jo Brachman, who has been an intellectual partner and co-conspirator in most things throughout my life, once even slipped into a benign coma or maybe it was just a dissociative state while I was holding forth about some branch of our family tree.
As a result of such reactions, sorry Jo, I've learned not to belabor the begats but to TRY to keep it light and give you guys only the more interesting stories and necessary details. That, at least, is my goal with this blog. I plan to keep it private, circulated only among family members and in-laws who can claim a bona fide connection to our Nance or Orr family trees. Over time, you will no doubt see posts or comments from folks you don't recognize. Please ask who they are and reach out to them....I've met a number of distant cousins, or spouses of cousins who are the researchers in their families, via Ancestry and other genealogical sites, boards, groups, or just by accident. They are wonderful folks and have great information or materials to add to what hopefully will be a fun and illuminating conversation between all of us about the ones who came before.
I have found the study of our family's history to be both healing of some old hurts and life-changing in a wonderful way. I am often moved, impressed and amazed by our ancestors. Their lives were harder beyond imagination than our own and yet they loved, played, laughed, worked like dogs, had children in numbers that now make national news and endured incredible losses that would find me drooling and singing nursery rhymes to myself in some unknown hospital. Nances and Orrs have fought and sometimes died in every war in American history until Vietnam. It would seem that once the draft ended, our branch of the family realized that we were pretty smart folks and could go do other things. Needless to say, I have conflicted feelings about this. I'm married to a veteran and I have friends whose kids are in the military or off in Iraq or Afghanistan today. I think we've followed the spiritual pull to service in other ways, for sure, but there is an element of sacrifice and debt to our elders that we've lost. They lived full lives, full of grandparents, parents, siblings, children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors. A number of them were quite accomplished in their own time. They were all thoroughly embedded in their culture and history and, as such, were at times heroic, sometimes were typical, and at times did things far differently than we would have. It's knowing about our elders as individual people and their activities that's made family history research so liberating for me. We are both connected to many, many unknown others in the present and are part of some very large tribes that extend back in time much further than I, for one, have ever known or pondered.
So what do ya'll think? Should I keep going with this? Now that I've proven I can keep my comments brief (ha!), is it interesting enough to compel your participation or are you counting your appliances? Let me know only after you've read today's list of factoids:
1. We've always known that Granddaddy Orr's brother, Howard, died in World War II, but did you know that Howard served in the 62nd Chemical Unit? I have searched for information on said unit, but to no avail at this point. Does anybody know anything about it?
2. Granddaddy Nance's father was an avid genealogist himself and passed it to Granddaddy Nance, etc. John Lipscomb Nance, get used to it---Granddaddy Nance's father, gleaned from a genealogy column in the Atlanta paper that Nances descended from the French Huguenots, 200,000 of whom scattered across the map in all directions to escape religious persecution from French Catholics between 1600-1700. Remember the Reformation and that little Catholic-Protestant spat? There is evidence that we came down that path but I haven't substantiated it yet.
3. Why was Great-grandmother Brooks' second husband referred to only as "Uncle Will?" Was he related to the Orrs somehow or to her Hendrix people? Steve, what's the story?
4. Speaking of Grandmother Brooks, one of her mother's ancestors led the push to establish Buncombe County, North Carolina as a distinct county in 1792. In fact, the meeting to sign the county's charter was held in the guy's barn. For those of you not in the know, Buncombe Co., N.C. includes Asheville, to which area several of us seem inexplicably drawn.
5. BTW, the oldest home in Asheville to this day belonged to Grandmother Brooks' mother's family. It was a hotel and is now on the National Historical Register with its own plaque outside and everything. Quick, somebody grab a
6. And finally, since it is Christmas week, I think we should also remember Nancy Christmas Nance, Granddaddy Nance's aunt, who was born December 25, 1841 and died February 19, 1924. She is buried as Nancy Vinesett (next to her third husband) in Gaffney, South Carolina, a nearby suburb of (hmmmm...) Spartanburg, South Carolina and not that far from Julie in Greenville. Nancy had 3 husbands, 15 children (within marriage) and is rumored to have had 2 or 3 more outside the bonds of matrimony. And we thought nobody had fun back then...