Thoughts
of a Local Historian
Dorris
Douglass
More than a hundred years ago
Death
called that you should leave your woe,
A
life of hardship borne with pride,
To
say not so, would I have lied?
Your
progeny now write to me,
Requesting
genealogy.
The
proof they want of when you died,
Is
not on tombstones, I confide.
For
wooden crosses long decayed,
Or
common rocks placed on the graves,
Identified
the Poor House dead,
Where
now a lake is found instead.
Your
name however flowed in ink.
The
county records have the link,
Receipts
for when the county paid,
To
have the Poor House coffins made.
The
truth I send your progeny,
Regarding
genealogy.
Contempt
to them, who now deny
You’re
kin, nor hear the Poor House cry.
But
cheers to those accepting you,
Into
their lines of blood so blue,
In
spite of where you met your end,
And
make the Poor House wear a grin.
***
Dorris
Callicott Douglass, librarian, historian, and genealogist,
is Head of Special Collections in the Williamson County Public
Library, Franklin, Tennessee. She is the reviewer of memoirs and
autobiography for the Library Journal. She published a bi-monthly
column in the Sunday Williamson Herald, “Two Hundred
Years Ago in Williamson County,” April-December, 2006. She
had a poem about the Civil War published in the online periodical
Combat: The Literary Expression of Battlefield Touchstones,
July 2005, and she published an article in America’s Civil
War, March 1996. Dorris has published various historical articles
in the Williamson County Historical Society Journal since 1980,
for which she won the award for best article in 1985. She has
held various chapter and state offices in the DAR and the USD1812
(Daughters of the War of 1812) since 1974. She is also in Who’s
Who of American Women.
©
Dorris Douglass