Exploring My Heritage Part 2 – The Harpers

I have an interest in peoples’ names – how they got them and what they might tell us about the person’s background.

For instance, my dad was named after his father, Paul Manuel Douglass. I remember asking him where the name Manuel came from – it looks Hispanic, although I’m unaware of any such lineage.  (It’s pronounced “Man-u-el,” rather than “Man-wel.”). He didn’t know and had never inquired. Maybe my dad didn’t share my curiosity.

There’s a motherlode of interesting names on my mom’s side of the family. My maternal grandmother’s family, the Harpers, were farmers in central West Virginia. John David Harper, who I appear with in an old black and white photo as an infant, had a wooden leg; I believe he lost it in a railroad accident. I don’t know anything about his wife, Lucinda Jane Evans, other than she bore 10 children whose names, and those of their spouses, are listed below:

Child	Married
Florence Emma	Steve Stevens
Grace Olive	Wilbert Kerens; upon his death, Enos Kerens (Wilbert’s brother)
Effie Ellen	Clyde Kerens (Wilbert’s and Enos’ brother)
Charles Jennings	Roella
Lella Fern	Hoke Caplinger
Oscar Maxie (died in infancy)
Orpha Mona	Joe Taylor
Blanche Leona (my grandmother)	Earl Frank Egleson
Floyd Michael	Edna; upon her death, Pearl
Opal Vergie	Hubert Martz

I remember many of these folks and relished saying the couples’ names: Grace and Enos, Lella and Hoke, Opal and Hubert, and Orpha (pronounced “Orphie”) and Joe. Why would John and Lucinda name a daughter Grace Olive? Or Orpha Mona? Or Effie Ellen or Opal Vergie? I’ll never know. Perhaps they weren’t unusual-sounding back at the turn of the 20^th Century in Appalachia.

 

The Harpers were farm people who took pride in subsisting on what they grew or made. Like Blanche and her family, my grandfather, Grandpa Earl, grew up on a farm in West Virginia. He wrote a memoir explaining how he helped make everything from maple sugar to wool socks. His family’s farm had a coal mine, pigs, sheep, vegetables, hay, and fruit trees.

 

When I was a kid, we would make the six-hour drive from Rockville, Maryland, up and around the Appalachian Mountains, to a state park in Elkins, West Virginia for the annual Harper family reunion. Inside a covered shelter were rows of picnic tables groaning under the weight of hams, chicken, homemade salads, rolls, side dishes of every variety, and pies. I mean, pies. Peach pies, apple pies, banana cream pies, chocolate pies, coconut cream pies, rhubarb pies. Lots of pies.

Some of these families moved to Florida in the 1960s. I remember going to a fish fry at a park by the St. John’s River near Deland. One lasting memory is of the segregated bathrooms and water fountains, marked “Colored” and “Whites.”

 

Such signs were only at the surface of deep, institutional, court-supported discrimination. As recently as my childhood, Jim Crow laws were alive and well, and not just in the deep South. Blacks were openly and widely treated, if as citizens at all, as third-class citizens, disadvantaged in every aspect of society: schools, job prospects, housing, voting. The movie Green Book focused on the issue, but I think glossed over it a bit. While Jim Crow laws have been rescinded, prejudice remains alive and well – in subtle and unspoken undercurrents and, in the last two years, ways that are not so quiet nor indirect.

I’d like to think my kin were staunchly opposed to such indefensible bigotry.  But that’s something else I’ll never know.