A FAMILY STORY -OR- THE (DAMN) YANKEES WANTED TO STEAL MY GREAT-GREAT-GREAT GRANDMOTHERS AND SELL THEM TO A SIDE SHOW

That is not just a catchy title, you guys.

I'll be honest, I don't know an awful lot about the history of my family. It's not that I'm not interested in knowing about it, but no one ever seemed to keep many records. We always heard stories about how we were related to this family or that (because we came from a small southern community that didn't see fit to marry outside of the county lines) and occasionally we'd hear a fifth-hand anecdote about how this cousin might have been buried alive, or that relative was sent to live in a mental asylum because they hit menopause and got a little emotional, but information is sparse as far as any real concrete history of our family goes. 

While we were staying with my brother before he passed away, one of the things that we did to pass the time was look through boxes of old pictures and news clippings that my mom had stashed away in a closet. My sister found a newspaper clipping, from a 1993 edition of the formidable Athens News Courier with a story (a story which I thought would have been brought to my attention at the time, but was not) about two of my great grandmothers. This was a story that would have tickled me to death as a teenager, and honestly, it kind of tickles me to death now. It's so rare that I find out real stories about my ancestors and its a bizarre story to boot!

First off, I suppose I need to explain why I keep saying "my grandmothers" in plural.  My family tree kind of joins back together in a certain spot.  My great-great-great grandmothers on both my mother's side and my father's side were sisters.  Actually, they were part of a set of triplets, born in 1862, and thought to be the first set of triplets born in the state of Alabama.  Their names were Melissa, Artimisa, and Narcisa Smith and they were the youngest of 21 (gulp) kids born to Roland and Elizabeth Smith on a plantation close to Cherokee, Alabama in Colbert County.

First off, I had no idea that any of my relatives ever lived on a plantation.  So...yikes. Until reading this story, I was under the impression that all of the people in my family had once been po' white sharecroppers and Native Americans, with some randos from other places thrown in for good measure. However, apparently this branch of my family tree had some money, and a plantation, and triplet daughters that were a very unusual occurrence at the time.

As you know, during the Civil War northern troops came down and burned and pillaged a lot of the plantations and farms of the people who lived in the south. They were not stand up guys, obviously, and when they got wind that there were triplets in one of the homesteads, it got back to the Smiths that soldiers intended to kidnap their daughters, probably to sell them to a circus as a side show act.  Roland Smith then took the time to build a false wall in their house where the hid the girls whenever the Union soldiers were nearby.  The fact that representatives from a county fair had also been after the family to allow them to display the girls in their own side show made the family aware that the threat of the Yankee soldiers very real, so according to the article "Fearing for the triplet's safety, the family left their plantation home and moved to Madison County, just over the Limestone County Line. They fled in the night, crossing the Tennessee river on a ferry, and traveled on to Madison County by horses and wagons."

Neato.

The Smiths then settled on a farm in Madison County, where the girls lived altogether until they were 21 and unfortunately Artimisia died of Pneumonia.  The other two girls, Melissa and Narcisa, went on to marry and have babies and those babies grew up and met and some of them got married and somehow I am a result of that craziness.

That is really all I know about the family, but I'd love to learn more.  Also, knowing that the family had 21 children probably explains my very complex, very interconnected list of cousins around these parts. The only other things of note that I found out was that Melissa (my maternal GGG Grandmother) had really thick ankles, so I guess I know where I got those from now.  The more you know!