Journey into the past

Ted, Kenidee, and I walked through the Old Carney Cemetery in southern Missouri with the sun beating down on us.
The heavy humidity made it feel like we were swimming upstream. Sweat prickled along my back and dampened my forehead.
The cemetery was small; no building housed an index of the plots; and some of the markers were so old and crumbly I couldn’t read the names.
I despaired of ever finding the headstones of my great-great grandparents as I moved along the rows.
“Over here.” Ted stood next to the tallest monument in the cemetery.
I hurried over, and one side of the memorial read, “Hastin Potter, Born Mar. 20, 1823, Died Sep. 13, 1877.”
His wife’s name, Orpha Jane Love Potter, was carved on the other side, along with her birth on February 5, 1825 and death on Apr 6, 1897, but the etching was barely readable. Some of their children were buried nearby.
Many mysteries remain about these ancestors of mine, but being near where they’d lived helped me imagine their lives more fully.
My curiosity had actually begun many years before, stemming from the sparse stories my dad shared about his family.
He and my aunt Helen always said their grandmother, Nancy Adeline Potter, was Cherokee.
When she was older, she came to visit them periodically, staying for a month or two, and then moving on to visit other children. She had 11 altogether, but not all lived into adulthood.
My dad didn’t like her because her visits put a strain on his parents who were struggling to provide for their six children.
Despite his dislike, one time when Ted and I were visiting him, he pulled out an eight-by-ten, black-and-white photograph of her. Her hard life was deeply etched on her face.
My brother and one of my cousins dismissed the possibility of Cherokee ancestry because there was no proof, and when I mentioned it to one of my friends, an expert on Indigenous people, he pooh-poohed the idea, saying, “Everyone claims to have a Cherokee great-grandmother.”
I argued, “But my dad and aunt say . . ..” to no avail.
Over the years, though, I kept wondering why my dad and aunt believed their grandmother was Native, so this summer I finally did an online search.
Eventually I found evidence provided by Kevin Korum on Geneology.com that, indeed, Nancy’s mother, Orpha Jane Love, was Cherokee and Chickasaw, with her family listed on the 1832 Cherokee census.
Her father’s ancestry was more of a mystery. In one document, Kevin said that Hastin “seemed to drop out of the sky” and that all the Potter men had married into Cherokee families by the 1840’s.
No doubt Hastin and Orpha Jane had difficult lives. The “Trail of Tears,” stemming from the Indian Removal Act of 1830, forced many tribes, including the Choctaw, Creek/ Muscogee, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles, off their ancestral lands, but many of the Chickasaws sold their land and made the journey on their own terms, and some of the Cherokees did the same.
We don’t know what Hastin and Orpha Jane Love did. Hastin served in the Missouri militia during the Civil War, and after the war, moved with his wife to Lawrence County, MO where they purchased land.
They had 13 children, but despite the large family, it appears they may have made an easier transition to the Midwest than many others.
After Hastin’s early death, Orpha Jane moved to Kansas and then to Indian Territory where most of her children lived.
Their daughter, my great-grandmother, Nancy Adeline Potter, married George W. Austin in 1876 in Cassville, MO.
Even though they had 11 children, it wasn’t a happy union. George was an alcoholic, and according to my dad, Nancy finally ran away, taking with her the children still at home, but leaving my granddad, the third youngest, in the field working with his dad.
Years later, she began to make the rounds of visiting her children.
I would have dropped the whole matter after finding the online information, but my hubby had other ideas.
On our recent road trip through the Midwest, we’d taken a hard copy to share with my brother.
I’d completely overlooked one sentence in that document: The final resting place of Hastin and Orpha Jane Love Potter in the Old Carney Cemetery.
After we visited with our son and his family in Lee’s Summit, MO, Ted googled the Old Carney Cemetery and found we were only three hours north.
That’s how we ended up walking through the cemetery on a hot Missouri day, peering at headstones.
Hastin and Orpha Jane’s granite memorial, the tallest in the cemetery, struck us. Someone must have cared deeply about them and had the financial means to honor their lives.
Why does all of that matter? To be honest, I’d never wanted to delve too deeply into my dad’s family.
He’d always dismissed his uncles, his dad’s brothers, as “ne’er-do-wells,” and he certainly didn’t respect their mother, his grandmother, my great-grandmother, Nancy Adeline Potter.
However, he revered his own father who had come from the same family, same environment, same challenges.
I’ve discovered we can’t disown our ancestors or their history, no matter how difficult, without in some ways splintering our own psyche.
People make choices about what to do with their pain, and sometimes a difficult past creates great people—like my granddad.
As Kahlil Gibran says, “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”