For the Johnny Cash Heritage Festival in Dyess in October, the author of a 2018 book on Cash identified several major Arkansas and family influences on the legendary singer’s identity and career that hark back to his childhood in Arkansas.
They were the songs he sang with his family while working in the cotton fields; the death of his beloved brother, Jack; the support of his mother, who encouraged him to keep on singing; and the backbreaking work of picking cotton that he had to somehow escape.
Dr. John M. Alexander’s book is The Man in Song: A Discographic Biography of Johnny Cash, published by the University of Arkansas Press. Some of the influences on the authentic singer were easy to discern; others, not so evident, as the book emphasizes. (See part of Alexander’s interview about Cash here)
That’s how it is with most of us and our families, as we soon discover when we begin to explore, identify, and reflect upon our family history. Cash was of English and Scottish descent. With “A Boy Named Sue,” he sang about the humorous challenges involved in having a male identity complicated by a female name in an environment intolerant of differentness. “Some gal would giggle and I’d get red; And some guy’d laugh and I’d bust his head; I tell ya, life ain’t easy for a boy named Sue.”
2018: A Year to Examine Arkansas Identity
Reminders of historic aspects of Arkansas identity have been highlighted this year by the commemoration of 76-year-old Little Rock Nine hero Elizabeth Eckford’s courage, through the dedication of a bench in her honor. It’s also just one more reminder of Little Rock’s identity as an important civil rights way station.
Likewise, the identity of Chinese American grocers in the Arkansas Delta was explored when adult children of the Forrest City, Hughes and Blytheville grocers returned to Arkansas to describe their childhoods in the midst of a sort of identity no man’s land.
As they explained at an Arkansas State Archives symposium in September, in the segregation era, they were considered neither white nor black, and were also neither quite Chinese nor American. They were blends of all of the above and were closely allied with African-Americans who, unable to shop in white grocery stores, patronized Chinese grocers’ establishments instead. This cultural survival experience shaped the friendships, futures and identities of both groups in the Delta.
Arkansas native filmmaker Vivienne “Lie” Schiffer’s “Relocation, Arkansas: Aftermath of Incarceration,” told part of the Japanese internment camp identity story as seen through the eyes of descendants. It also showed how a daughter of Italian immigrants in Arkansas made sure that the Japanese experience was commemorated for cross-community understanding. Released in 2016, it was highlighted in July when Japanese American internees and their families returned to central Arkansas to reflect on a screening of the film.
RELATED: Arkansas Ancestors Who Flew Too Close to the Sun
Examining Your Family’s Identity
Arkansas has a rich heritage of identities influenced by African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, German and Italian Americans, just to name a few. Where does your family fit in, and how can we generally create a full picture of identity for ourselves and our children?
Families are often shaped by lore of one side of the family more than others.
Expand your knowledge of “the other side” by building a family tree, but also providing context for the part of the family that is lesser known and understood. A tree is surely not identity per se, but it’s a helpful starting point.
DNA testing is another basic step, especially if descent is unclear. You can start your research at the Arkansas State Archives.
Explore the beliefs, customs, foodways (and ‘drinkways’) of all immigrant contributors to family identity. Sometimes we receive recipes, letters, and artifacts from our Irish side, for example, but have nothing similar for the other national or religious heritages of our families. That means we know less about them, though the other heritages may have influenced our families over time just as much or more. Religion was of special importance in community building in early America.
RELATED: Explore Final Destinations to Enliven Ancestor Stories
Embrace the “disliked” or wayward/wanton side of the family, if there is one.
Often, key facts about extended families are left unknown because someone had lesser affection for great-grandpa or great-grandma, or grandpa’s binge drinking occasionally made him “incapable of management.” It’s possible that some ancestors werestinkers, but that their extended families were historic and fascinating. Don’t miss that potentially beautiful part of your family heritage.
Dig a little deeper. Take care not to overlook urban ancestors because the current family is more rural in orientation, or vice versa. Taking the time to truly understand the history of all aspects of our families – urban and rural- helps us understand the historic rural/urban split, current politics, and also “brain drain” when family members leave a location because of heightened affluence, or were pushed out by economic necessity.
Family members who leave a location permanently are often different from those who stay. What does that mean about the overall family’s identity?
Leave home. One way to heighten immediately understanding of identity and historic family members is very simply to travel to where they lived, in Arkansas or way beyond. All at once, even if an area has changed, ancestor experiences are sometimes crystallized through genealogy travel in ways that other kinds of important research just can’t achieve.
As internee descendant Paul Takemoto said in “Relocation, Arkansas,” when he travelled back to the state where his mother, Alice, spent part of her childhood, “Going to those places allowed me to see just a sliver of what they went through…that’s not something I really understood until I went to Jerome and Rohwer.” Takemoto said that by meeting people in the community where his mother lived and seeing the terrain, he finally came to terms with his own Japanese-American identity.
Psychologist Erik Erikson invented the term “identity crisis” partly based on his childhood in Europe, where he was criticized both for Nordic heritage and for his Jewishness. Identity became a lifelong subject of study for him, with perhaps unintended benefits for all who seek clarity in family history influences and their outcomes. As Erikson wrote, “In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.”
Jeanne Rollberg is a genealogist with American Dream Genealogy and Research who serves also on the boards of the Arkansas Genealogical Society and the Friends of the Arkansas State Archives. She teaches genealogy classes at LifeQuest of Arkansas.
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