I just got my project up and running yesterday.. It’s taken me all of fall semester to make it, but I knew it would. It challenged me so I learned a ton, and I had so much fun with it.

www.anglinfamilyhistory.com

The forms aren’t working yet.. so I’ll be updating that soon.

Anyway, I had to share this link. I’m so excited to have it up.

The site I made for my brothers’ band will be up shortly too… just as soon as I get some updates finished on it. I bought a package deal from 1and1.com.

We grew everything, virtually, that we ate. There were very few things that we bought. Uh.. you would have to buy coffee, of course, and sugar. Uh.. we used a lot of molasses uh, for sweetening, because we grew sugarcane and um, would process it and turn it into molasses, and that was our sweetening a lot of the time.

Uh, Mother grew a large garden. We grew.. uh.. pigs of course, and slaughtered them in the fall. Wd did not at that time butcher a.. beef cattle. We didn’t do that. Our main meat was chickens that we grew, and of course the pork.

All of our water we carried from down the hill from a spring that came out of actually a very large tree. They had dug a basin to catch the water, then had channeled some of it into a little ditch-like that they had enclosed to keep the animals away. The water then flowed in to make a little pond, enclosed the little trench that they had.. built it with a wood cover so that they could keep butter and milk and foodstuffs there that they needed to keep cold.

Mother had to carry all of her water that she used – for baths, for dishwashing, for drinking, for cleaning. Every drop of water came from that little spring.

The spring is still there today, and I’m seventy-five years old, so you can tell how long it’s been there. But it still is running; you can still go down there and see it today.

I was born in April of 1932, which was, of course, right in the heart of the depression. There was… next to no money in the hills of Kentucky, of course. My parents, after a short time living with my father’s parents, went to live on a small farm that my mother’s father owned. He had actually built the house for his family, then his family lived in it until he bought a general store up in Three Links, Kentucky. I was born in Climax, Kentucky.

It was just a five room house. There were two bedrooms, a very small living room, a fairly large dining room, and a next-to-nothin’ kitchen. The kitchen was only big enough to hold the coal stove that my mother cooked on. It also was one of our main heating stoves, because the only other thing we had to heat with was a fireplace in the front bedroom.

But we lived there on Grandpa’s farm until I was five years old, and then we moved to Harrison, Ohio. I don’t remember a whole lot about the move, other than someone had brought a truck and we put our things in it. I don’t remember.. um.. how they got the horses there. They undoubtedly took them on a truck, because it was much to far for them to have ridden them – uh, maybe another truck, or maybe they made two loads and took the horses on one. But we did bring our horses. We brought my dog, Rounder.

Uh, we moved into a, uh, house very similar to the one we moved out of, except that the rooms in it were a little bit larger. Uh, there was a fairly decent size kitchen. No running water, but they did have a well. And, so Mother didn’t have to carry water up the hill from the spring, and she appreciated that very much.

 The farm that we moved to was mainly a sheep farm. I think they did have some cattle, uh, but they, uh, really raised.. their – their main crop was sheep. And they would shear the wool, and sell it, and then they would, of course, uh, you know, butcher, uh a sheep or two, probably, in the fall, much like we did the – the pigs.

 We lived there a couple years; I started school there, and uh, rode the school bus. I remember living there as a – as a good time.

But when we got there, my dad walked in the house - and Mother and I of course, hadn’t seen it. And uh, he walked in and he – he reached over on the wall and flipped a switch, and I thought he had performed magic because the lights came on. I had never seen electric lights until then. We had had nothing but coal oil lamps.. uh.. in the house.

We had Mother’s cookstove, of course, which burned wood, and we also had – uh, and I believe it belonged to the landlord – uh… a potbellied stove in one of the other rooms that we used kinda as a living room. And that’s how we heated the house. And uh.. but it was wonderful, I thought, to have electric lights, because they were much brighter than the coal oil lamps were.

 We grew, of course, like we had in Kentucky, we grew uh.. a large garden and pretty much the same.. made – made out pretty much the same way. I don’t know how my father was paid other than that the house was furnished to us, and he did get part of certain crops, I guess. And I honestly don’t remember if we grew tobacco there, probably did. But I just know that he helped with whatever the landlord had, uh, that he needed help with.

We moved from there, then, to Amelia, Ohio. We lived on a farm with some cousins of my father’s. They lived in a large plantation-looking house – their family; they had a large family. We lived in a small house very similar to the other two houses we had lived in.

Uh.. and there, my dad – they dug a well, and I guess the owner bought pipe and stuff, and my dad, uh, ran water into the house so, uh, at that place we had running water.

And we grew chickens. We had large chicken houses, and they had little.. their own little, uh, cage-like thing. And they had numbers on their legs. Then we, uh, Mother had to keep record of how many eggs they produced. The man that owned that was a man by the name of Mr. Brown. He was a doctor in Cincinnati. And he wanted the scientific things.. uh.. on his farm.

And Uncle Charlie and his family – they grew gladolias. I don’t remember what else. But I know we had a.. roadside stand. Mother would can chicken and sell it. They would sell their gladolias, and they would sell eggs and garden produce. We had a.. like I said, a roadside stand.

We lived there a couple of years, and then we moved to Hamilton, Ohio, where my dad went to work in a factory – the first money-paying job he ever had. We’ve lived in that area ever since.

[Note: I did my best in transcribing this, but with an electric guitar right behind me, it's kinda hard to hear parts of the recording, even with the speakers turned up... So anyone reading this -- please forgive any discrepancies. ]

I remember my dad being over in the woods one day.. and I wanted to go with him. And he really didn’t want me to go. Because I was fairly small. He didn’t want me over there in the way - maybe get hurt, because he was cutting down trees, you know, getting wood ready for the winter, and you did this virtually year-round, except in the dead of winter because you didn’t want to have to go out when snow was on the ground, and back then you got fairly deep snows in the winter time.

Uh, so he was working over there. Well Mom – I don’t remember if I slipped off and went or.. if my mother finally gave me permission to go, I honestly couldn’t tell you. But I did go to the woods after my daddy. He saw me coming, and he told me not to step in a little branch – really wasn’t a creek – it was just a little branch, a very small stream of water that went down through the woods at that particular point. And he told me not to get in it. Well I loved the water. My Grandma and Grandpa Coffey had a creek running beside their house, and then one in back of their house, and I loved to play in those creeks. So, the water was so enticing, I just couldn’t pass it up. So after I’d playaed for a while, I did end up in the water. Actually I think I sat down in it, and just was having a really good time.

Well my daddy found me, what I was doin’. I think he paddled my bottom a li- a smack or two, and sent me to the house to my mother. Well when my mother saw me, she was not happy with me – needless to say. And it was not really bad cold, but she did have a fire in the fireplace in the bedroom. So she took off my outer clothes and then stood me in front of the the fireplace to get dried off. That was part of my punishment, was havin’ to stand there to dry. I got a little bit too close and just about burned my bottom. Needless to say, I kinda stepped away from the fireplace. But, my parents were not very happy with me that day.

I would go to the field with them when they were, uh, hoeing corn. When I was very small, they would sit me at the end of the row when they started hoeing down that row – one would take one side and one the other and I would sit there and I could watch them. And they could see what I was doing, they could see I was alright and everything. So that’s how they had babysitting in the fields back then because I had no brothers or sisters.

I remember one time we went over to my grandma and grandpa Coffey’s – they lived at Disputanta, Kentucky, on what was called Clear Creek. It had been raining a lot and the cr – uh, there was a creek the way we were going that day, that, it wasn’t over the banks, but it had risen quite a bit and was almost at flood stage. We were on horseback, I was riding in front of my mother on her horse. They took the horses out into the stream, and I remembered being so afraid because the water was really rolling fast, and it was deep and it came up to the horse’s waist, and the horses actually ended up swimming more than walking because it was so deep that their feet would not touch the bottom at the middle portion of the creek. But we made it across safely and went on to my grandparents’. I was fairly small at the time but I still remember being afraid and how scary that water looked.

My dad farmed the farm. He was what was known as a tenant farmer, or.. a share-cropper, if you.. are used to that terminology. My grandfather provided the house we lived in, bought the seed. My father, uh, farmed the land, then they would split the profits when it was sold, anything that was sold. The main money crop in Kentucky at that time was tobacco. Every farmer grew tobacco because that’s the only way that he could get any money of any amount to speak of, in that day and age.

During the Depression, the neighbors didn’t have money. You know, if you worked for them, you traded off work, you know, you’d go help them, and then.. when you needed help, they’d come help you. You know, with maybe the hay.. gathering, or maybe gathering corn, or whatever. But you would share work sometimes, but nobodyhad any money to pay anybody.

They virtually did all the work on the farm. Once in a while, Mother’s brother would come and help. But mostly all the the work was done by my dad mainly, and when she could, my mother would help.

My dad, when Franklin Roosevelt was president, he developed a program called the WPA, and most people are familiar with that terminology, except the very younger people today may not be aware of it.. But it was a program that he developed in which they would improve roads and certain things that benefited the communities. They would hire the men in the area that wanted jobs to work. My dad worked on the WPA. I don’t remember how long. But he furnished his wagon, his team of mules, and his own labor, and hauled rock, with which they were working at the time. I don’t remember if the rocks were to clear the roads, or if they were using them to build maybe fences. Some of the fences back in that day and time were built up of rock. But he hauled rocks for two dollars a day. Now that was a lot of money back then. You know, it isn’t anything now. I mean it wouldn’t even buy a gallon of milk today. But back then that was a lot of money. So that was how my dad supplemented the tobacco crop money.

My mother told me one time, she said the – she and Daddy, the first, when they first moved to the farm that Grandpa owned, they had not been there to have a garden, because they were married in October. Uh.. so, she did not have that canned goods and uh, the stuff from the garden that normally she would’ve had, uh, put back in a, uh, root cellar. One day she said that she had cooked the last potatoes and had used up the last food that she had. And, uh, she had fixed it for Daddy’s lunch, and he came in and he looked at the table, she said, adn he said, “Is this all we’ve.. got for lunch?” I’m sure she broke down and cried because I know my mother. And, she said, she was so embarrassed to tell him that she had not been a better planner, that she had run out of food. And.. he wasn’t angry at her. They ate their lunch, and when he had finished, he went out and saddled the horse.. and.. I don’t think he even told my mother where he was going - she didn’t say he did. But he went up to my grandfather’s general store and had a little talk with him, established credit, and grandpa let him have whatever he felt that they would need, uh.. to do them for a while. And I’m sure that.. uh, my grandmother probably ended up giving them, you know, some potatoes and different vegtable and stuff, from her root cellar. And, probably my grandmother Coffey did the same when she found out. But they did make it throught until time to put a garden out. And of course from then on, uh, Mother always made sure that she grew enough and preserved enough and stored enough that she didn’t run out of food ever again. She said never again did she run out of food.

And, uh, now there were times that we might have cornbread and milk for supper, but I liked it. I didn’t realize I was, maybe, some people would’ve considered us, you know, really poor, but I never did consider us poor. I always had clothes to wear, I always had food to eat, I don’t ever remember going hungry.