Mood:
brightTopic: "Findin' William"(11)"
200 years of History is like a fart in a windstorm. No one notices. If one were to stand on the grounds of the Battle of Hastings (1066), then there is significance attached. The anniversary of apparent relevance does not become important until one-half of a milennium has taken place, at least that is why a 500 year-old Hobbit sees things the way he does. His search for a Revolutionary War soldier becomes a pretty good story with little apparent interest to the greater good. Follow me therein.
William McKinny arrived in the New World with someone named Thomas. Frodo is not sure if he were a brother, a son, or some other relation. What we do know is that he drove a wagon as a soldier in the Continental Army, whose primary conflict was in opposition to the indigenous peoples who sided with the British. When the War ended, the boys in blue were unable to pay their volunteers as well as the Regulars. They were granted land, based on rank, in the frontier to the West of the Colonies. William McKinny, a private, received 1 square mile, 644 acres, in the territory known as North Carolina. When he died, some years later, the property was sliced and diced between children until it became something similar to the expunged gas cited earlier above.
Sam has a genetic interest in the events that followed over the next two hundred or so years. Some time ago Frodo took on a challenge through an evil Stepmother to trace the descendants of William McKinny. Sam accepted the challenge as Frodo inhaled until his lungs burst. Surprisingly, at least to him, Frodo found that he could trace the ancestry with relative ease, for a couple of hundred years, then he hit a proverbial "rock." Frodo was not alone in his assessment that the trail had reached conclusion with the death of William McKinny, from a land uncertain, whse mortal remains disappeared over time.
That is, until this past week. Frodo found a receipt signed by an official of the US War Department in Shelby, North Carolina, who approved a familial request (in 1938) for the placement of a Headstone on the property formerly owned by his family commemorating the service of the Revolutionary War soldier buried alongside Sandy Creek in the little town of Bakersville, Private William McKinny.
Frodo now knows where the adventure of this immigrant concluded. Now he needs to finish by finding out from whence he came to the wilderness. Funny it is, he thinks, that in these tremulous times, when so many immigrants are challenged by the recently indigenous, that William McKinny, who gave the gift of Sam to Frodo, is still adding to the relevance of a Headstone, along the creek bed, on the land that once was his.
hug me
lyrical
blue
don't ask
not sure
energetic
crushed out