Fried Potatoes, Mustard Greens, Fat Back, Soup Beans, and Cornbread. . .: Retracing the Vanishing Footprints of our Appalachian Ancestors
by Louis E. Adams
Category: Reference

“. . . Retracing the Vanishing Footprints of Our Appalachian Ancestors” represents a genealogical history of thirteen major pioneer families who settled in eastern Kentucky during the 18th and 19th Centuries. The surnames include Adams, Berry, Brooks, Brown, Burton, Castle, Chaffin, Daniel, Large, Thompson, Ward, Wellman, and Young. To fully appreciate their social and economic hardships and challenges requires the reader to visualize what life was like on the early frontier. After the American Revolution and the Civil War, many of these early pioneers traveled from North Carolina and Virginia into the sheltering hills of eastern Kentucky via Cumberland Gap and Pound Gap. Others came from Pennsylvania. They settled in early Floyd and Lawrence Counties, which were later divided into present day Boyd, Elliott, Floyd, Johnson, Lawrence, and Martin Counties. They were mostly of English, Irish, Scotch-Irish or Anglo-Saxon extraction and made their living by farming the hilly terrain or working in the coalmines. Some supplemented their income by trapping and hunting. They may have been poor by economic standards, but they remained a proud and independent people with strong character traits. Many of their descendants have gone on to become physicians, lawyers, teachers, scientists, military leaders and public servants.