When Genealogies Collide

Today, I went to a Sacred Harp singing in a very, very, very out of the way and rural Quaker meeting house in Pennsylvania.

Although Sacred Harp had been virtually unknown outside the hollers and the mountains of Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia until a desperate grad student chanced upon it in the last 1970s, it was originally brought over from England. The shaped notes were supposed to help make it easier for the 'unschooled' to learn singing. Initially it was taught in New England and moved to the south. It was fading fast until the desperate grad student stumbled on it.

Today's singing had about sixty people there, one from as far away as Oregon.

The meeting house was not air conditioned, nor where there fans other than the "Zook's Funeral Home" kind. I got cooked half way through lunch and could do nothing more than sit on my pew and sweat.

I wandered over to the burial ground, now just a low, fenced property next to the meeting house. Across the narrow road were fields and fields of corn and wheat. It seems the first haying (?) is done. I moved aside the ivy on the plaque newly set on the stone fence. It read something like, "Here rest the remains of many of this meeting house's members, including the Lees, the Milhouses, and the Ellman families."

I froze a little bit. (I wish it could have been more.)

We'll pretend right now that my last name is Hillman. Unfortunately, my name is so unusual (and only four syllables, total!) that there are only two of me in America. My genealogy of my father's family has centered mostly on the Philadelphia area and for some reason, poof! All the Hillmans made tracks out of PA around 1800.

I've learned that it was around that time that part of the family decided to go along with the common corruption of the name, dropping the "h" and making it Ellman. No more Hillmans to be found but Ellmans aplenty.

Including this graveyard.

And I thought, how odd that I am here, like some personal family harmonic convergence. (Which, of course, we all are.) From the hollers and the backwoods of northern Georgia on my mother's side to somber Quakers on my father's side, how odd that it comes to be together, in this place.

I liked it.

But not enough to sweat to death and join my ancestors in the graveyard.

I said my good-byes and got back in the car before I died.

I bought "The Sacred Harp" book. The good thing about this kind of music is that you only kind of have to sing. The emphasis is on numbers and loudness. Tune - well, the other folks are more than happy to carry that along if you want to be loud. That I can do.