My mom’s father married at least ten times, to nine women.
Granny’s father was a member of the Dallas County Local of Socialists. Had my maternal grandmother’s father really been a communist in early twentieth-century Dallas? Had my mom’s father really married thirteen times? Had his father really killed a man with a hay hook? Slowly I confirmed these stories, at least partly. When I did start researching my ancestors, only my mother’s side interested me: the Texan rabble-rousers, scoundrels, and misfits I’d grown up hearing about. So I never expected to become interested in compiling my own family tree. He was an avowed white supremacist, a defender of slavery, and I aspired then to be as little like him and his branch of my family as possible. Growing up, I associated genealogy with the begats of the Bible, with an old family tree my father showed me, and with my father’s reverence for the Old South.
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