Family History Comes Full Circle

Sheila Quinn’s writing journey.

Have you heard this one?

“Uncle Shelby was driving down the road with his arm out the window when a cow fell off the mountain and broke it.”

Of course, you haven’t heard it, because I know now that it’s a family story. 

Growing up, I thought it was a joke, only I didn’t understand the punchline. Or maybe it was a cautionary tale, but I didn’t know what offense Uncle Shelby committed that I should avoid. I heard this little ditty, as my grandma might call it, countless times and never asked any follow up questions. Sadly, this was the case for much of our family lore.

My great-grandma, “G.G.,” was the keeper of our family’s history. She told us tales of her Sequatchie Valley, Tennessee family including the unfortunate Uncle Shelby. I wish we’d been better listeners. Unfortunately, as much as she tried to get us interested, we didn’t take to it. We didn’t ask questions or write things down. As a result, many of the stories became lost to us or have had to be tracked down and pieced together from the fragments of each person’s memory. 

Beginning in 1981 and continuing into the late 1980s, G.G. collaborated with cousins, aunts, and uncles to compile a book of genealogy and family history documenting the descendants of William Shelby Tollett who headed west to avoid involvement in a violent feud. One Christmas, she gave each of her children a brad-bound book with a black cardstock cover, The Tennessee Tolletts Volume 6. Ours went into the cedar chest, the standard storage for precious treasures.

In 2015 I started trying to record our family’s stories. I even borrowed my mom’s copy of the Tennessee Tolletts Volume 6. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. My questions and discoveries piqued my mom’s curiosity. Around the time I moved from Texas to Tennessee she spit in the Ancestry vial and started taking pictures of headstones. In other words, she was all in.

During mom’s first visit after I moved to Nashville in 2018, we made a day trip to the Sequatchie Valley to visit family sites and cemeteries and to walk in the places our ancestors called home. We visited the Bledsoe County Library in Pikeville, home of the Bledsoe County Archives and Historical Records Repository. Within their collection, we found a set of Tennessee Tolletts volumes.

Here, on the shelf of a library, among other historical records, my great-grandma’s culminating work seemed to hold greater significance than it had in our cedar chest or on my desk at home. I was anxious to take it off the shelf and thumb through its pages. 

Did G.G. know her book would end up here? Did she have faith that there would be people more interested in her work than we’d been? Did she forgive our flippant responses? 

I can hardly describe the thrill I felt to see my name in a book on a shelf in the library of a town that I hadn’t known I was connected to until a few months earlier. Thirty years after my great-grandma’s labor of love, my name existed within a collection of local histories. She’d included me in the Sequatchie Valley story before I’d ever heard of such a place. 

The book, the place, and the story had been waiting for me all that time. I felt like a heroine being sent on her quest. I could bring the Tolletts of the West back to Tennessee.

Now my quest is ending, and I’ll be back in the Sequatchie Valley February 29, 2024, to launch my debut novel, So Long As It’s Wonderful, 100 years to the day since the close of the book’s story. The novel’s main character is none other than my great-grandma, Willie, collector and keeper of the family’s stories.

I believe in a unifying energy in the world, what Elizabeth Gilbert calls Big Magic, and others call the muse or the universe. How else can one explain these mysterious concentric circles?

Sheila Quinn grew up in West Texas and spent significant time in Eastern New Mexico listening to the stories of her grandma, upon whose life and family her fiction is based. She lives and writes with her family in Franklin, TN. Learn more at sheilaquinn.com.

WWW Disclaimer