Georgia Green Stamper – Georgia On Her Mind

Our youngest grandchild, Georgia Jane, is learning to read. She’s in Kindergarten at a shiny new school filled with the most up to date everything. Seven hundred students, in grades K-5, learn with her. Like a traveler from a foreign country, I attempt to tell her about my first school although she stares back at me with uncomprehending eyes. She cannot imagine such a strange place.  

Each person who tells the story changes some detail as though we were archiving various versions of an Appalachian ballad. Sometimes they add a bit information I do not know, shared with them by a relative long dead. More often, they confuse the location, placing it here, then there, on the wrong farms, in the wrong county. They’re hazy about the names of the players. All but hers. Calla Lily Hudson.

When I opened my email account on Mother’s Day morning, I was surprised to find a “holiday greeting” from, of all people, the search engine at Ancestry.com. I’ve pictured him as a C-3PO sort of robot hunkered in a lonely basement alcove of the National Archives who earnestly tries to answer my requests for old census records and land deeds. Previously he had displayed no sense of humor. Now, out of the blue, he wanted to share “fun facts” about the mothers in my family tree.