When given the assignment to do a family migration study, I was pretty excited. I love knowing about my family roots, and I believe it behooves us all to know a little bit about where you come from. Honestly, I felt I had a good start on this project before I even began my research; I know all of my aunts and uncles, and where my parents came from. However, as it turns out, there’s not a lot more to the stories that I already knew.
    I’ll start out with my dad’s side of the family, the Normans, from, the best that I know, central Kentucky. My grandfather was born in 1899 and fathered ten children, my dad being the youngest. Growing up, I always knew that the whole family had lived and worked on a farm in the one red light (use to be stop sign) town, North Middletown. I also knew that my dad hardly knew his father, as he died when my dad was just seven years old. What I did not know was that my grandfather had also lost his parents at a very young age, and he was moved by other family members from his home in Indiana to Kentucky to work on a farm after their deaths. No one in the family still living knows where in Indiana they came from, or even names to link back there. Most of my dad’s siblings moved north to Ohio to work in factories for better opportunities once they got old enough. Had my dad not been seen by one college recruiter during a high school basketball game, I don’t know that he would have had a very different story than his siblings. However, he was presented with a full scholarship to a small college, Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College and then to Georgia Southern, where he earned his Bachelor’s Degree and met the love of his life, my mom. They both went on to Georgia College to receive their Master’s Degree in Education. To this day, my dad is the only Norman to earn a Master’s.
    Over to my mother’s side of the family, growing up I felt I had a good sense of the deep southern Powe roots that she came from. With my grandparents both from Camilla, Georgia, it was hard to say the south didn’t run in our blood. I had always heard about the land that my grandmother’s family owned there, from the country store my mom’s grand daddy had to their farmland where she was raised. Camilla was all my mom knew from either side back to her grandparents, and again, with deaths of people too young, there wasn’t much more to the family history that got passed along.     
    At first I was frustrated with hitting walls on all fronts just past my grandparents’ generations. Didn’t anyone come over on a boat? Help to settle the colony that was Georgia? Or native to the land referred to as anything from Kaintuckee to Cantuckey? My dad always told me his great grandmother was a full blooded Cherokee Indian, where is she!? Unable to answer any of these questions through the knowledge of living relatives or intense Internet research, I began to take in what I do know. Perhaps it’s ok to not have a name to the beings who helped shape who I am, that doesn’t mean I don’t know them or my family roots. Their intense work ethic and love for family and homegrown roots have trickled down through the years and generations. I may not be able to document my family’s migration back hundreds of years, but I can feel it running through my blood and present in the person that I am today.