That rumble you just felt was generations of my ancestors turning over in their graves, because I am a southerner to the core descended in all my lines from ancestors from the deep south and it’s Texas counterpart, East Texas.

I honor and respect my ancestors and do not sit in judgment on their lives as individuals even though they lived in and surely supported a culture which fought and died for, among other reasons, keeping the another part of the country and the national government from legislating or otherwise forcing the end of slavery in this country.

There is no evidence, documented or by family tradition, that the vast majority of my ancestors owned slaves. We were, for the most part, farmers who used family members for the farming labor. That being said, there is no question that the two major questions settled by the Civil War were slavery and do individual states have the right to go their own way if they disagree with the rules and laws of the majority. Slavery was an abomination which should have been settled in the 1770’s and 1780’s when our nation was born. I’m glad it ended, sorry it took so long to end it, and perplexed that we ever allowed it any role in the long history of the colonies or the United States of America.

And, I understand if descendants of slaves, don’t share my honoring of the valor and recognition of the hardships even unto death faced by my ancestors during the Civil War. I get their own take on the conflict incited by an attempt to prolong slavery.

I’m sure that my ancestors served and fought for all the right and wrong reasons associated with this war even the few who served on the winning side. Yes, my families like many others had brothers and cousins who served on both sides.

I regret we couldn’t end slavery or forge one nation, indivisible, without war, but I’m glad for both of those outcomes. I’m proud to be a citizen of the United States of America. — Deason Hunt

I am reduced to such thoughts due to the power outage growing out of the seven-inch accumulation of snowfall. Power has been out for and hour and half, and I’m beginning to grow a bit antsy.

I can’t turn on a light switch and get instant light on whatever I am doing. I can’t check my phone machine for missed messages (although a battery backup from the cable company keeps the phone line working at present.) I can’t get cable service due to the need for electricity to power my cable boxes, but that’s not very big considering I need the same electricity to run my television sets anyway. The downside is that my internet service provider is also my cable provider. I am writing this in hopes it will be found by any survivors, and it will be shared with the world.

Toilets are working, and I have running water. That’s very good. On the other hand the refrigerator is now racing against the clock to spoil all the food inside. For our safety, we don’t have natural gas, and they (the anonymous they) try to discourage tanks of liquid gas on the properties here, so no electricity means no heat. Yes, we have a fire place, but it is only a matter of time before we will be breaking up furniture to get some dry wood to burn.

It took me six tries to get my car UP and out of my driveway earlier this morning (with only minimal damage to the car and a nearby tree), so I broke association rules and left it parked on the side of the road. Because of that I can get out and drive over the activity center (about four miles away) for a hot lunch and to use their wireless internet connection. The bad news is that the wife keeps saying she’s not going — something about eating soup and roasting hot dogs at the fireplace.

My ancestors lived in log cabins, no electricity and with just a fireplace for warmth. If they had time to write out something like this, it was most likely with pencil and paper, and they were most likely thankful for having the things I am moaning about having to live with.

Sometimes I wonder about how they made that long trip from eastern Tennessee to eastern Texas before cars, trains, buses, and airlines when I sometimes find myself dreading the 30 mile trip into Tyler in an air-conditioned car.

If I had been the ancestor, I wonder if all the family today might still be living somewhere on the road well short of Texas and nearer Tennessee.

Posted here AFTER the electricity came back on (for the third time, but at least it stayed on this time).

Posted also at http://woodtxgene.com/

The blame falls on me and the fact that in July two things happened. (1) I learned that I was to become the editor of the newsletter for the Wood County, Texas Genealogical Society on September 1 of this year. (2) I discovered the website genealogywise and began to be active there with two groups I created. One was a Coffee Klatch for Wood County researchers and the second was to raise the question of how we might help our genealogical societies especially small ones struggling with membership and financial problems.

I was determined to combine the newsletter function of the Wood County Society with a weblog in order to ease communication and to reduce our printing costs for the newsletter. You can see the results of that on-going and on-growing project at http://woodtxgene.com.

I am still working out the genealogical society help site which is called Save Our (Local Genealogical) Societies at genealogywise. You can see it here (http://www.genealogywise.com/group/sos), and suggestions and contributions are solicited.

I have also been active on Facebook, and I have posted a TFTD (Thought For The Day) for friends there every day since I began in March of this year.

Of course, I’ll never know, but I determined that at least for one generation my descendants will have such information — just in case some unknown grandchild or great-plus grandchild is interested someday.

I (Deason Hunt) was born in 1943 during the Second World War of the 2oth Century. It was over about the time I turned two years old, so I obviously don’t remember it as a contemporary. I spent lots of time hearing about it as I grew up, and along with playing cowboys and Indians, my friends and I played lots of WWII make-believe. I carried wooden M-1 rifles with fake bayonets, BAR’s, and we sat in foxholes, also make-believe, fired at the Nazis and Japs with our 50-caliber machine guns and tossed an occasional hand grenade. There were army surplus stores where we could walk around and look at all kinds of army gear, and war movies were as popular with young boys as shoot-em-up western movies. There were lots of on-screen war heroes who we tried to imitate, but the greatest of these was John Wayne. Most of our dads served during the war, but, at least in our family, that service was never mentioned. I found most of the details of my Dad’s (Deason Hunt, Sr.) service after his death by papers I inherited and some additional research.

I also was not aware of the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan to end the war in the Pacific. I was, however, aware later that it had happened because we lived under the threat that the Soviet Communists would attack us with their atomic weapons. These were felt as real threats to end civilization, and we had duck and cover drills in school (get under the desks and cover your head/neck with your clasped hands). These were also handy for the weather scourge of the areas where I grew up in Texas — tornadoes. People bought and buried and otherwise built underground fallout shelters in their yards, (We were too poor to afford one.) and radio/television had signal tests in case of enemy attack — the test of the emergency alert system. After the fall of the Communist state in the Soviet Union in 1989, we learned they were as worried that we would do the same to them so that we had a world-saving standoff. It turned out that the play-like enemies of our youth, the Japanese and the Germans, became our allies during the cold war, and we actually spent all those years hating/fearing our WWII ally, the Soviet Union. To be continued…. Next, The 1950′s

I started my trek in genealogy in the late 1970s (my earliest correspondence files dated 1977) after receiving one of those “fill-in-your-family-tree” books for Christmas. I was like most starters just facing an empty 5-generation chart with little more data than my generation and that of my parents. Filling the blanks was the goal that motivated me at first with who and when. Over the years, my goals changed as I got deeper in some areas of research and broadened as I found interesting side paths to wander down.

It finally hit me this morning as I was driving and listening to NPR — No ancestor left unremembered. That’s what drives me three decades later. And I mean it for all my ancestors and all ancestors of everyone interested in genealogy and even those who could care less.

My religion teaches me that immortality has to do with the soul, and I get that. But I think how sad it is that people live out their lives and, one day, they are lost not only to memory but to history itself.

My limited reading in the development of family trees and genealogy leads me to believe that it is only the royal, rich, and famous who history remembers. Yet, don’t all our ancestors who laughed and cried, who passed days and nights of joy and pain, whose blood line and DNA testifies to the fact that they were here — don’t they deserve to be remembered? The common folk worked the fields, marched in the armies, raised the crops, and paid the taxes which allowed the rich and famous to be that and deserve their place in the sun. It is in remembrance and documentation that we save them for now and the future.

I don’t know where I will fit in the far distant future. I doubt that rich, powerful, or famous will ever be used to describe me; however, that doesn’t matter. My time is now with the resources and the stories which could disappear in a few generations. It is my place to provide knowledge of that which has gone before me so that the greater story might be known or written by future generations. Perhaps as we work and preserve names and memories today we set the stage for tomorrow’s more universal enlightenment of the value of all lives which otherwise might disappear into the mists of the past.

The first was a memory of my Dad and namesake, Deason Hunt. As we walked among the tombstones of Hunt Cemetery in eastern Rusk County, Texas, he was telling some of his memories. At the stone of his Aunt Lou Vicey Hunt Ables (1846-1922), Dad recalled her funeral. He was 12-years-old at the time. At the cemetery, the coffin was opened for viewing before burial. It was snowing that cold December day, the 17th of December. It is likely my granddaddy Joseph Lafayette Hunt was there unaware that in an odd circumstance, he would die exactly 27 years later on December 17, 1939. My Daddy remembers as he looked into the coffin, a snow flake fell upon his Aunt’s cheek appearing as if a tear.

Years earlier, Daddy recalled, that, as a child, he was allowed to feel the bullets still carried in his leg from the Civil War by his grandfather, Thomas Edmond “Buck” Fears. This would have happened no later than when Daddy was 5-years-old because that was his age when Buck died in 1915 in the Hunt home. Daddy’s sister, Gladys Jewel Hunt Stewart, remembered in 1978 that Daddy woke up that night and asked “what’s happening.” When told what had happened by his mother, he said that “old Buck wasn’t dead.”

More memories will appear on this blog as time goes by.

Like everyone, I suppose, the nature of my heroes changed as I got older. In the 1940′s there was Roy Rogers. That hero worship would later turn to admiration as I followed his life while I was an adult. The “King of the Cowboys” first fascinated us in the movie theater and then on early television. Since I was a child during the last years of WWII and the post-war years, I guess it would also be no surprise that John Wayne playing WWII and old Western (especially U. S. cavalry) roles was a great favorite. We were children of a war era.

In the 1950′s like most kids, “I Like(d) Ike,” first WWII Allied Europe commander and General Dwight D. Eisenhower and then U. S. President. I remember going downtown in Longview to the Republican headquarters and getting “I Like Ike” buttons and wearing to Foster Junior High and passing out extras to friends. Also, in the 1950′s there was Mickey Mantle. In an era before Texas major league baseball teams and even before the Dallas Cowboys, for most kids, the New York Yankees were America’s team. Mickey was the young, talented player most of us could identify with and look up to.

I had a number of teachers in school who I thought were the “bees knees,” but they three I most looked up to and, in many ways, took traits and procedures for my own teaching career were Mr. Glover, Mrs. Bourne, and Mrs. Prejean. To this day I think of them like that, and I would be very uncomfortable calling them by their first names.

Mr. Robert “Bob” Glover was my Tyler, Texas John Tyler High School American history teacher. His class was fascinating. His teaching style separated him from all my other teachers. It was like we were hearing stories and not studying history. After class was over, his students would often talk about what we had learned in class that day. I joined the high school history club mainly because Mr. Glover was sponsor.

Mrs. Mary Bourne was a bit scary. While I was in high school, I dreaded going to her Senior English class. She expected you to be prepared, to participate, and to get it right. She was tough, and I had to step up to the plate in that class. We studied English literature and related English history. For that reason, she was nicknamed “Bloody Mary,” but I know of no one who ever called her that in her presence. When I got to college (and in later years), I was better prepared for college English than many who not had her as a teacher. To this day, I appreciate her as a dedicated teacher who had our best interests at heart.

Mrs. Blanche Prejean was my journalism teacher at Tyler Junior College. She was also tough and a bit scary. She demanded your best preparation and effort. You knew better than to not deliver it. Work habits, diligence in research and writing, accepting that rewriting would be a way of life and path to excellence, and a love for traditional journalism were learned in her classes and labs and as student sports editor.

As a teacher, I never thought of myself as on the same level as these three, but trying to get to that level made me better than I would have been on my own and has kept me trying to improve even to this day. You never saw them on the silver screen or television, but they are forever among those (including my wife and parents) on the pedestals reserved for the special people who have guided me to where I am today. My heroes.