Appalachian Family History: From Germany to Tennessee

When we started Stories from the Mountains through Hearts of Appalachia, there was a very personal reason behind it. My own Appalachian family history taught me how easily family stories can be lost.

I know what it feels like to realize too late that there were stories you should have asked for.

My Granny, Bessie Elizabeth Rector Polk, was born in the mountains of East Tennessee in 1911. Growing up, I never thought of the things she did as “Appalachian.” They were simply Granny's ways.

They were in the way she cooked and cared for her family. They were in her speech, her love of music and her ability to play by ear. Granny taught my mother how to cook, sew and keep a home, and some of those same ways eventually made their way into the home where I grew up.

I didn't understand then where they came from.

My dad's work took our immediate family away from his family home. My brother and I visited often, but our cousins grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles and older relatives in a way we didn't. They heard family stories simply because they were there.

You don't realize what you've missed when it was never in front of you.

By the time I understood how much I wanted to know about Granny's childhood, her parents and grandparents, and what life had been like for her growing up in East Tennessee, she was gone.

And the truth is, I don't know how much of the older family history Granny herself ever knew. Some of what I would eventually discover had happened nearly two hundred years before she was born.

I found that part of our story through genealogy.

Granny's Rector family took me all the way back across the Atlantic.

The Rectors were originally Richters from the Siegerland region of Germany, an area with a long history of mining and ironworking. These families included miners, ironworkers and skilled craftsmen, and those skills played an important role in how my ancestors came to America.

My immigrant ancestor, Hans Jacob Richter, his wife Anna Elisabeth Fischbach, and their young son Johannes were among the German families who became the First Germanna Colony in Virginia in 1714.

They had been recruited for a mining venture in America and were led to believe they would be mining silver. But after leaving their homes in Germany, and being stranded in London for a time, what awaited them was not what they had been promised.

They finally arrived in Virginia, where they found themselves bound for four years to Governor Alexander Spotswood and living on the Virginia frontier.

Historical accounts confirm that mining became part of their lives at Germanna. Governor Spotswood described the Germans as miners in their old country, and by 1716, John Fontaine was writing about visiting their mines, collecting ore and attempting to smelt it in the settlement's smith's forge.

Eventually the Richter name became Rector. After leaving Germanna, later generations of the family lived in Fauquier County, Virginia, before my branch continued south and west.

My fourth-great-grandfather, Cumberland Rector, was born in Virginia in 1774 and made his way to Rhea County TN where his son Landon Rector my 3rd GG Father was born in Spring City. This is where the next generations remained and raised their families. Landon had actually been appointed Constable of the area for a few years and then around 1825, he built and operated an iron forge on Piney Creek, powered by water.

When I first discovered Landon's forge while researching our genealogy, I thought it was interesting. Somewhere along the way, though, that piece of information slipped into the back of my mind.

Then I recently came across it again.

This time it stopped me.

Here I was, generations later, running Hearts of Appalachia, researching Appalachian coal-mining communities, preserving miners' stories and creating memorials for miners and their families.

And there, in my own family history, was a thread of mining and ironworking that stretched from Germany to Virginia and eventually into the mountains of East Tennessee.

I didn't start Hearts of Appalachia because of Landon's forge.

I didn't become interested in coal miners because I knew my German ancestors had been miners and ironworkers.

I discovered the connection after I was already doing this work.

And somehow that makes it mean even more.

I've loved the mountains for as long as I can remember, long before I understood my family's connection to them. Maybe that love was simply ingrained in me long before I understood where it came from.

But genealogy and family stories aren't the same thing.

Genealogy helped me discover Hans Jacob Richter, Germanna, Cumberland Rector and Landon's forge.

What genealogy can't give me are Granny's memories.

I can't ask her what her childhood home looked like, what she remembered about her parents, where she played, what songs she heard growing up, what made her laugh, what frightened her, or what stories the older people in her family told when she was a little girl.

Maybe she knew some of the older Rector history. Maybe she didn't.

But she knew her own story.

And that's the story I wish I had known enough to ask her to tell me.

That is one of the reasons Stories from the Mountains means so much to me.

If you still have someone in your family who remembers those earlier days, ask now.

Ask about their childhood. Ask about their parents and grandparents. Ask about the old homeplace, the mine, the mill, the forge, the farm, the church or the schoolhouse. Ask about the songs they sang, the food they cooked, the work they did and the ordinary things they may not think are important enough to mention.

Because those ordinary things are often where the real family story lives.

Write it down. Record their voice. Save the photographs and put names on the backs.

Don't assume you'll remember.

Don't assume your cousin remembers.

And don't assume somebody else wrote it down.

Because family history doesn't always disappear all at once.

Sometimes it disappears one unasked question at a time.

And that is why we created Stories from the Mountains. ❤️