Manalto wrote:It's wonderful that you're keeping those traditions alive; they're well worth it.
I'd like to know more about my own Scotch-Irish forebears, other than vague references to Nova Scotia. When I'm in the Southeast U.S., I keep bumping into people who look like they could be relatives - and nobody misspells my last name!
There's one tradition I haven't managed to keep alive. It's a strange one that seems to come from a mix of Scottish highlands culture and Indian medicine. Some folks are familiar with the term of "healers" because of a popular TV show called Outlander, but it's got a bit of a different twist in the Appalachians and rural areas where I live.
In my family, there's been "healers" for as far back as anyone can remember. There's folks in my line who "have the power" to stop bleeding, take the thrush out, and "stop the fire" in a burn (pull the pain out). My mother recalls my uncle, who had severe health issues and a birth defect, getting a horrible nosebleed as a toddler. Their great-aunt went over to him in the kitchen, spoke his name several times and some phrase she couldn't remember, and the bleeding immediately stopped.
My great-uncle spoke of this woman also saving his favorite horse from bleeding out when he got spooked and ran into a fence post. She "spoke the words" and the bleeding stopped on the horse and he supposedly got right up and started grazing like nothing ever happened.
My mother knows of children having thrush (yeast) in their mouth, and this woman could "speak the words" and the thrush would go away, even when medicine couldn't do it. She also spoke the pain of burns out of folks, and I was told of a story by my distant cousin of his mother cooking supper in their big colonial-era fireplace and burning her hand, and a family member "spoke the fire out" of the burn, and it didn't bother her after that.
In our family, the "power" is passed from a female blood relation to a male blood relation to a female blood relation. If a blood kin tries to pass the "power" on to another same-sex blood kin, it won't work in my line. The last we know, I have a second cousin who has the "power", so I would have to get her to tell a male blood kin about the power, and he would then have to pass it on to me for me to have it, but if I tell anyone else what it is outside of a male blood kin, I will not longer have the power.
I have been told by some of my older relations, though, that because I've got a weird knack for things medical and such that they suspect I am a natural "healer", but I haven't been given the knowledge of the "power" yet.
Manalto, you should check out Ancestry.com. It's been very helpful for me to track down my family line in addition to the work my dad's done through the years. Their DNA testing is also very interesting.