Faux Real

We got home from our trip to Pennsylvania yesterday, and thanks to some of your suggestions we did manage to visit Fallingwater as well as Fort Necessity and a couple of other places. I thought we were closer to Pittsburgh than we actually were, so once we realized that Pittsburgh meant another couple of hours in the car we stayed close to Uniontown.

Uniontown, PA, was the site for this year’s W****** Family Reunion, which is really less a reunion than it is a genealogy trip exploring my mother’s family lineage. My uncle’s baby, the reunion takes place biennially in a place that is historically relevant to the family history. All kinds of relatives, close and distant, showed up to participate, many of whom can only be considered relatives if you go back six or seven generations.

Things
Christian Klay Winery has excellent dry white wine. Try the Blanc de Lafayette if you’re ever in the area. We rolled up our sleeves and bought a case.

Fallingwater was ridiculous. It’s absolutely beautiful and extravagant, still contemporary by today’s standards, and our tour guide sounded something like this:

This kind of family reunion is really an exercise in white privilege. Don’t get me wrong, I had a good time and I don’t want to minimize the importance of knowing one’s roots, especially for my own family who have had a hand in organizing many of these gatherings, and especially with additional emphasis on “the importance of knowing one’s roots”. First it assumes you (in the present) have the time and money and access for extensive research, which secondly depends on whether your historical relatives had the privilege of accurate record-keeping, marked graves, proper burial records, i.e, rights of existence that were not available to most non-white, non-privileged people in early American (as we know it) life. Because much of genealogical research is based on record-keeping such as family Bibles and school, Social Security, military, and city records and the like, you have to assume that the infrastructure existed in the first place and secondly that your ancestry was able to take advantage of it. Moreover things are made that much more difficult if someone along the way changed your family surname to better assimilate and/or subjugate your ancestry.

That said, after some discussion, it became clear after some discussion with my father that we know nothing about his family before his grandparents. In their area of the country and in their social class, it would be incredibly difficult to trace back much further, even knowing that his lineage would have emigrated from the old country (presumably Germany, GB, or Scotland) and emigrated again from the east coast of North America to Arkansas and Mississippi River country. Chef’s family too knows little about their lineage past Chef’s great-grandparents, and what they do know is their Irish and German surnames and very German settlement in this area of Indiana.

Just some thoughts. I have no strong feelings or judgments on these facts, but it is what it is.

If I were so inclined, I could join the Daughters of the American Revolution. Why I won’t.

I have some really cool relatives, past and present. I won’t go into details because I want to preserve familial privacy.

We spent part of Saturday at Fort Necessity, the site for the first engagement for the French and Indian War/Seven Years’ War, which is apparently the only battle that George Washington ever surrendered. There isn’t much at the park except a replica of the original fort and a refurbished historical tavern that sits on National Road, but I did go through the park center’s small museum which explains the events during the Battle of Jumonville Glen.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been to a historical museum, even one of this size, so I was surprised to see a few unexpected truths especially considering the many grossly inaccurate mythologies that surround American historical narratives. First, they represented the warring factions — French, British/American, and Native American — as equal players in a world war, as opposed to lumping the Native American players as unequivocal add-ons to French political interests. Secondly, they also included a comprehensive display on how the battle was one of the first in a colonial disaster, emphasizing the destruction done to global native populations as the British built a world empire from the Caribbean to India.

Finally, despite the impressiveness of the above, what I found most interesting was a little meta-narrative on the museum and reproductions themselves. The museum ended with a historical display on previous incarnations of the Fort park, and how these representations supported a jingoistic view of American history in lieu of accuracy by representing Washington as a war hero instead of this battle as one of his greatest embarrassments, building a massive fort replica instead of properly representing the fort as the travesty it was, and even displaying previous versions of commemorative brass plaques that codified these purposeful inaccuracies.

I strongly identified with Sybil Vane’s observation on that “squeamish conflict between the kind of idealism and awe a city full of landmarks and history can inspire… and the cynicism she feels when she considers what goes on in [national landmarks] and what it has come to mean for her” when she wrote this last week, because look, I love history and I even unintentionally got a history minor in college when I discovered I’d fit in enough classes to qualify for one, but I’m tired of the willful ignorance that goes into history displays when the opportunity to represent historical nuances fully, with all their messy details, is cast aside in favor of another cherry tree fable. I can only hope this is a national trend.

Big ups to the Fort Necessity National Park for including commercial titles like “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “A People’s History of the United States” in the gift shop.

I don’t know if it’s the whole state or the county we stayed in, but we were goddamned if we wanted to buy booze. Liquor is not for sale outside of a bar or tavern, and the area beer stores only sold by the case. You could, however, drop into a bar and buy a six-pack, thus with the full bar, sweet karaoke gig, and copious bottled options, the Holiday Inn seemed to be the coolest hangout on that side of town. Sadly.

I did discover, however, that my mother is very fond of Yuengling, and if prompted will break into spontaneous cheerleading during unrelated conversation.

It could be a Southern thing, but there are a whole lot of nicknames circulating my family. Personally the most amusing is that my sixteen-year-old, 6′2″ 220 lb. nephew is still referred to as Baby James.

It was a good trip, better than I expected it to be, and I got to re-meet some relatives I haven’t seen since I was a kid. Also, lots of excellent wine.