What’s in a name? Ego, often, and a large fraction of your heritage. I’ve alway been puzzled by patrilineage, especially after studying the anthropology of bonobos and matrilineal societies. And my instinct was not to jump in the car with my dad and photograph graves all day and struggle to imagine people who left almost no trace (isn’t this a losing battle?). But then I decided to go on a road trip where I take time to let any leftover aversions melt away – time to listen. So, thanks to my dad’s passion for genealogy (both matri- and patri-lineal), here’s why our last name is the Scotch-Irish word, Gilchrist.
After I’d been in Courtland for a few days, and had a picture of the family tree both in my mind and on paper, my dad came to show me around. Just getting on the road to town where his grandmother lived and died and where he went to high school puts him in a quietful cheerful mood. Which is different for him.
The Courtland Cemetery is full of Gilchrist tombstones, in the old-fashioned ornate marble with logos and pyres, and in the newer, plainer style, with the text lasered into a smooth, granite face.
It’s not organized in an intuitive way, and it requires some thinking to decode.
It helps to start in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee to the north. There, it started with Malcolm, a Gilchrist brother who, in my dad’s mind at least, was sent down from the Charlottesville, Virginia area to the Tennessee/Alabama area to populate the land. He had a million boys and a few girls with Catherine Buie, and a few of them got gigs surveying land in northern Alabama. A few in particular really liked it; the youngest, Archibald, stayed home in Mount Pleasant, though, so his grave is there. Their daughter (Catherine’s namesake) also stayed behind and married a Mount Pleasant man; their graves are closeby.
The headstone is legible because my dad had the old one recreated a few years ago (he can’t remember if it’s been 3 or 4, or as many as 10).
Back down in Courtland, Malcolm, Jr. and Philip Philips Gilchrist did the most, as my students would’ve said. I could have spent hours trying to connect all these gravestones and figure out who was who. Philip’s first wife (called a “consort” on her gravestone) is rumored to have died tragically of a fallen branch to the covered wagon; she died in the same year as an infant child, according to The Lumber River Scots.
His second wife died, too, after they had an artistic son named Joseph (who lived to 44). Then Philip finally married the woman with whom he started the line of ancestry to which I belong: Alice Armene Garth. They are my great-great grandparents. (Ellen Hampton, my gracious cousin and host, is a Garth, so we are related through Alice Armene.)
My great-grandmother, Louise Winchester Clark Gilchrist, was fondly “Granny” to my dad. Granny’s Clark lineage is one that my dad and I traced at Doro Plantation in the Mississippi Delta, along with my dad’s mother’s.
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On Monday, Ellen organized a bunch of lady cousins for a lunch at Food Fite, my cousin Ginny (Gilchrist) Fite’s family’s restaurant in Decatur. At lunch, Edith Haney told my dad how angry everyone on ancestry.com is about his moving the old headstone. That certainly doesn’t phase him; especially not in the presence of a gaggle of beautiful, kind cousins, and a daughter, who has taken a sudden interest in ancestry.
