Angie Follensbee-Hall | Understanding Her Place Through Ancestry Work

Stories in Our Roots – Episode 40

Angie Follensbee-Hall | Understanding Her Place Through Ancestry Work

Heather Murphy: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another episode of stories in our roots. I am glad that you are joining me today to hear Angie Follensbee-Hall share her stories and experience of connecting to her heritage. One of the best things that I've got out of her conversation is about how she does not want her culture melted.

And you will be able to hear what she means about that, about her connection to the land, both in Sicily and in the United States and how she's incorporated elements of. Her family history and women's history in her mixed media art here is the interview with Andy Pollins B hall.

 Hi Angie. Thanks for joining me today. I am glad that you're here to share your stories and experiences. Could you introduce yourself please?

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:01:18] Yeah. Hi Heather. Thanks for having me.  My name is Angie Follensbee-Hall, and I'm an artist, a teacher, and  creativity enthusiast.  I teach and lead yoga classes and workshops and trainings, art workshops, trainings. I have an upcoming retreat to Sicily and I just love working with people and helping them connect to those parts of their lives That make feel really alive.

Heather Murphy: [00:01:49] That is great. And so how did you become interested in learning about your family history?

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:01:55] Yeah. So I have always thought about my family because I was born in Sicily.  My mother's family is all from Sicily. My dad met her in the Navy. He was stationed,  on Sicily at a place called Sigonella and. He knew somebody that knew my mom's family and they eventually met and married over in Sicily.

None of my dad's family was at the wedding.  and I was born there. When I was about 18 months old, they left Sicily to come back to America. My mother didn't speak any English at that time.  I was always told, Oh, you were born in Sicily. That's so special. Like goes in my,  no, no, my, my mother's father would say your Oh, Cecily,  owns you.

Right? You, you are a part of Sicily because you were born there so that, you know, always had me thinking about my roots in a way that I don't know that everybody thinks about like, Oh, there's something special about where I was born in the people that I'm connected to.  and so that was always sort of in my background,

and I, and of course, you know, my,  American family, I was very immersed in, like I spent all my, my dad has six brothers and two sisters.  So it's a big family. And so I spent a lot of time with them, but  I've spent time with my mom's family, but not as much. I didn't think much about my dad's family.

 I'm a yoga teacher and, and I've been thinking about,  ideas around ancestry and like my role as teaching,  yoga as a white woman. And what does that mean? And, and it, it led me to investigating,  where's my place,  do I have a place in teaching yoga and also investigating, sit on what of course was Abenaki land. And my family has been here for hundreds of years, so they were responsible for pushing these people out. And so all of that got me to thinking, I need to look into this a little more and learn who these people were and really discover my place with all this. And I'd say I kind of was in like a crisis place in a way, like not feeling connected to this land here in America.

Like I didn't belong in a way. But I knew I belonged to Sicily, but at the same time, I don't speak Sicilian. I'm speak Italian, you know, so it put me In this weird place of where the heck do I belong and what's going on. And so that's really what led me to look into my ancestry.

Heather Murphy: [00:04:25] Okay. In our correspondence before the interview, you said something that really jumped out to me. You said, even though I live in the melting pot, America. I don't wish to have my culture melted. Could you explain that more?

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:04:40] Yeah, I wanted to really pick apart, like what, what is my background?  Where do I belong? I think that's the word that keeps coming back to me as this feeling of belonging. And you know, when my mother came over from Sicily, She didn't speak English. And she came alone, right? Some Italian immigrants came over with family.

Like my husband's family came over from Italy in the 1940s, but they came over as a group, right? Like multiple people from Italy coming over. And I think when that happens, there's a preservation of culture that people will speak the language with each other. And some of the customs will remain in the family tradition, but my mother came over alone and she felt.

The pressure to assimilate into American culture, to not speak her language to,  really just, uh, I mean, she came from Sicily to Vermont, like it's the big, like, weather-wise, it's really different culturally. It's really different.  so my perspective growing up with my mom was that she was a little different than everybody else.

Right? Like we, we would. Have like octopus at dinner. Nobody else In this area has octopus at dinner or she would seek out, the grocery store had like some exotic fruits and they'd have like prickly, pear cactus every once in a great while. And she bought it, she goes, this is amazing stuff. And my friends were like, what do you eat?

What's this so weird. So that's this, the phrase like weird, right? So the pressure to assimilate, I feel like kind of lost some of the culture and that's what I meant by. I don't want my culture melted. Right.  I want to preserve those pieces that are connected to place in land.   and I feel like when we come.

Into a culture like here in America, that it's easy to lose our roots. It's easy to forget where our families came from and what were their traditions, the foods they ate, the things that they spoke, the stories they told, it's really easy to lose those things. And so I became really interested, especially more recently in my older adult here years,  of, uh, finding those stories and, and really owning them.

Heather Murphy: [00:06:49] In what ways have you then been active in making sure that your culture is not melted?

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:06:56] Yeah.  so lately it's been a lot of conversation with my mother and asking about her family and traditions,  and. Learning that the little quirky things that she did actually have a place in culture. So, you know, it's a food centric, culture Sicily, of course. So not only is cooking the meals and the food you eat really important, but everything that goes around food is important.

So like trips to the grocery store where like big events and really important. Friday night was like grocery night at growing up and we would pile in the car. We would drive to the grocery store, my brother and I would be actively involved with pulling things off the shelves, into the car.

We come home, it was like a ceremony putting the food away. And I just kinda thought that's what everybody did. Like they went out grocery shopping as a big family unit and it was kind of a, I used to get excited about it. And I even tell my. My boyfriend in high school. Oh, I can't come over. We were going grocery shopping and he'd be like, what are you talking about?

And so I realized that it was so important because it's just like a cultural tradition.   It was putting those pieces together. It wasn't just some quirky thing. My mom did. It actually belonged to her culture in her ancestry.

Heather Murphy: [00:08:11] You also, mentioned that part of why you were starting to look into your family history is because you had kind of a disconnect between your connection to the land of place. Can you talk more about what that feeling was like for you and how this process has helped you gain what you were looking for?

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:08:31] In some ways I feel kind of lucky because I was born in Sicily. So for me it was a real immediate, like connection to my European roots. And like I have immediate family, their immediate cousins,  my grandparents,  it's really easy to stay connected when,  I was the first person on that side of the family to come to America.

but on my dad's side,  my grandmother, my dad's mother had done some ancestry work and dug through the files and found who the people were, who first came to this country. And,  on my dad's side, I had relatives come over to the Montreal region in the 1690s. And,  I had another relative enter in the 1640s through Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Right.  And so they'd been here for several hundred years and I grew up here. So even though I had all this connection to Sicily, like I grew up in Vermont, New Hampshire, I'm very connected to this, you know, idyllic sort of like Woodland landscape. And my dad is really,  in love with the woods and is always spending time there.

But I thought, well, I don't belong here though. Like my ancestors came over and. The whites out, the indigenous people, they were part of that. my first ancestor who came over on my dad's side, it actually says in the genealogy,  he was killed by the Iroquois.  But he was also granted land from the governor of France or wherever they were from a parcel of land, which probably, you know, I mean that wasn't his to give.

Right. So it it's complex. And. I really felt a crisis of like, I don't belong on this soil here. Like my family came over and it didn't, it's not right. They don't belong. So where, where do I belong? And so my, my easiest route back Sicily, that was my easiest escape. You could say a couple of years ago in 2019, my family went back.

So it was my husband and daughters and my mother and father. We went to Sicily and I've been back a couple other times, but the first time as an adult, and it was an amazing connection to the land, like absolute like my body. I always feel like my body remembers that's where I was born. And my uncle, my Zio, no, Joe, my mother's uncle actually showed us these ancient, ancient ruins,  in a nearby town where  my grandfather grew up in Palo Gonia Sicily and there were neolithic ruins like over 10,000 years old.

And I thought. Wow. My family has been here for the thousands of years. I was like, I belong here. That feeling of belonging, like clicked it all into place for me. Then it helped me to realize that I can belong here too. Right. Like I can belong on this soil too.  and I really felt that connecting to those ancestral roots, like healed my pieces. It put things back together.

Heather Murphy: [00:11:27] So, what was it that made you feel like you could belong and United States soil?

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:11:34] Recognizing that, that the earth doesn't really have boundaries. You know, that, that we, that we still exist  on this world. And we have a responsibility to like, To honor it and to,  tend to be kind with it, to be in right relationship with land. And I feel like being in Sicily  and having like that healing moment there.

Open the door for me to feel that here, back in the States.  I don't know if I, if I can describe it really clearly, it was just like this. It was like when a wound gets healed inside sign, like an emotional wound, like you don't carry that pain forward into your other relationships anymore. And I felt like that was a piece of what happened. Like it was an embodied experience. Like I actually felt it in my body that, that being in Sicily, put something back together again, and just feeling like I could belong there helped me to feel like I could also belong here.

Heather Murphy: [00:12:29] Okay.

Yeah, it does. So how have you incorporated these connections that you've made with your past, into your professional life?

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:12:40] Yeah. So I think about land in place a lot, and I've really embraced,  my Sicilian culture. , I try to weave, so like my dad is so connected to. The natural world and,  in the woods, particularly you really imparted that to me and my brother growing up. And that comes through my art making and my art making is imbued with. Connection to land and earth and environment.  I'm constantly trying to weave, like I type words up and I play at collage words. I'm a mixed media artist. I've I put words on the pieces that tie back to land that talk about earth land or trees or, or birds. And these are really things that are here in where I'm in Vermont now.

I mean, it's a, it's a different landscape and system is cactus trees and, uh, it's a different climate. So I'm not really bringing those items into my artwork. I'm not putting cactus trees in my artwork. I'm putting like the trees that are here, the birds that are here. And because this is where I find myself.

Heather Murphy: [00:13:47] Yeah.   Another thing that was mentioned before we, met today was you have a tradition of seamstresses in your family. How does that play into who you are today?

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:14:01] Yeah. So it's in a few ways, right? So, I mean, most immediately, my mother,  when she was insistently,  she apprenticed with a seamstress when she was young in her teens, and so she is actually quite gifted with sewing and stitching. And when she first came to America, that's how she found employment.

Was being an independent contractor,  sewing. And she did unique things. Like she would sew hats, like funky hats, like with things sticking out and she would help sew them. Uh, she worked for a lady who made handmade dolls and Teddy bears. And so I grew up with like armies of doll parts and Teddy bear parts on the kitchen table.

So it was always around my mom's. Sewing. She had the sewing machine out. She was sewing, small parts. She would sew clothes and costumes for us. She would sell her own curtains and sofa covers even my daughters. Now she would make they're like costumes. So I grew up around the sewing machine. I didn't embrace it the same way she did, but I used stitching a lot in my work.

 I do handmaids stitching. I would like a, just a needle in a thread in my handmade paper. Well, the other thing I love doing is incorporating,  linens, antique linens. And I think about this because I think about the women and women's work in  my women's ancestry, right. And all the women I'm attached to going back generations and how that was their role, right.

Was to sew clothes for the family to, to do the stitching and the decorative work and in Italy. Crocheting and Lacework is, really important. And my mother's grandmother. Used to do a lot of that. ,  I go to antique stores and I seek these things out, I seek out these,  duallys and little crocheted things and linens, and I find ways to put them into my artwork.

I make handmade paper. So sometimes I can put them right into wet paper or I can attach them to the surface of the paper. And I feel like when I'm doing that, I'm connecting myself to. All of my female ancestors,  who did this work for generations to keep their families close. And of course,  now I'm just doing it as a artistic statement, more so, , but whenever I touch it, I remember that , that was the female role for so many years.

You know, it's so crazy. When you look through your, my ancestry, my ancestry on my dad's side. Because my grandmother actually did the work of going through and finding the historical people. It's interesting to me how the women Are left out. You know, like there's so much emphasis on the men and the man got the land and he came over for this job and he was connected to this important person, any married so-and-so and that's all you hear , for my great, great, great, great, great grandmother, Mary, you came over with her husband, that's it?

It's I don't even have a maiden name. I have a last name for her. , and so in a way, I feel like it's a way of remembering the women who were lost.

 Heather Murphy: [00:16:59] Are there any stories or ancestors that you feel a connection to on your father's side of the family? Cause you seem to have this great matriarchal line about the other side.

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:17:11] So, I mean, my dad has a big family, right. So, I mean, I grew up with my dad's family. My aunts and uncles and , my grandmother and my grandfather on my dad's side were , my influential grandparents. Like I saw them like every weekend growing up and they're still alive. They're in their nineties now, and they're, they're local, they're still around.

And I just, we celebrated my grand parents, 75th wedding anniversary on zoom.  and so I feel really connected to my grandmother. My dad's side, my paternal grandmother, , because she spent a lot of time with me growing up. ,  and I spent time with her and she really, again, it's kind of food centric.

Like we did a lot of baking together. I remember making banana bread with my grandmother. , and I remember too visiting  my grandmother's mother's would be my father's grandmother. They came direct from Canada. My grandmother came over when she was a little girl in the 1930s, they came from Canada and they immigrated into Vermont and she spoke French Canadian.

did not speak English. So it was interesting parallel to my mother.  and I remember going to their house and it was like walking into French land. It was, everybody spoke French Canadian, and I didn't understand anything the same way. I didn't understand anything when my mother's family would talk, but it was a whole different language.

 I think in that way, being like sandwiched around all these different languages or minding me that , there's more to culture  than just what I was experiencing, like in school and in regular Vermont, New Hampshire life, like there were multiple languages that could be spoken and different cultures and traditions in those families.

 So I do feel like this connection to my, to my direct grandmother and then her, mother.  When they were married, they lost. They lost one of their children to a Spanish flu actually in,  1918, they lost, or it was his actually was almost thinking it was my great grandfather's sibling was lost in the Spanish flu.

And I think about that a lot. My own daughter was very, very sick at age three. And so I think about those relatives who, who lost. Children at very young ages. And we're so lucky we have the medical world we have now,  we don't have the risk of that in quite the same way.

 I think about, about them on my dad's side, especially recently in, in our pandemic now and, and all the loss that's happening.

Heather Murphy: [00:19:39] if you could summarize what learning about your ancestors has done for you, what would be kind of the ultimate thing that it's done for you?

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:19:50] I really feel like it's helped me to feel like there's a purpose and a place for my story. It's helped me to really embrace my story and to feel like part of a bigger story.  I think as humans, we need connection. And I think in our modern culture, it's kind of easy to lose that, to lose those stories, to get really wrapped up in this online world and or social media stuff and whatever tasks we need to do.

And we forget the stories and the traditions, which I think were a bigger part of our culture for a long, long time. That was the entertainment listening to the stories of your family. And we've lost that a little bit. And I feel like diving into ancestry,  brings me back into that place of story and makes me feel connected.

I was even just looking up  the tract of land that my first ancestor from France got when he came over and technically was in Canada, it was in the St. Lawrence river. And it's said like, what. Parcel of land. He got some islands in the St. Lawrence river. So, I was looking it up on the map and I could see it.

I was like, Oh, there's the Island. Isn't that wild. That, that was my first ancestors, like track of land here. and it it's really fascinating to be reminded that you're a part of the bigger story and it helps me just feel like connected. And I think we're all needing that a little more.

Heather Murphy: [00:21:12] So,  if you had the opportunity to give someone advice who felt like you did at this beginning where you, didn't have that connection and you struggled with your place, what advice would you give to them?

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:21:24] I think that people really need to look into their stories to learn the names of their ancestors to learn a story of where they came, you know?  If anybody's from America, we have a story going back, like two other continents, unless you're indigenous to this land.  And so I think it's really, really essential and important for those of us who have those other continent connections to, to find those.

And I think it's important to go visit those places if at all possible.   I think it puts the pieces back together, or it reminds us that there's a bigger story at play that's global. And I think it's easy to, to forget that. And I think it also connects us to culture in a way that gets melted.

Like I said, as we started it, there's a little bit of a melting in, in America and we forget that there are ancestral stories that go back thousands of years, and it's really important to remember those.

So, yeah, I think they should dig into their ancestry, find the stories and the characters, and then if they can go visit those places.

Heather Murphy: [00:22:30] yeah, I think that's a really interesting perspective to not let her their selves go. Melted. Like for me, both sides of my family have been in the United States for  generations. And so it has all gotten melted for me, but I think there's something to it. Like you said, of identifying those places and realizing that our ancestors weren't all melted into the one and we have unique things that we get from each part of them.

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:22:57] Yeah. it's fascinating to me discover if there's like a family tradition that you have that might link to some cultural origin, right? Like if you always do something a certain way, maybe there's  UN origin in a country. Back over in another continent. That there's a reason for that.  and I think that it just puts their pieces back together  I think unifying is good but melting. Isn't great.

Heather Murphy: [00:23:23] Well, thank you so much for sharing your stories and your experiences. This has been a great conversation.

Angie Follensbee-Hall: [00:23:29] Thank you, Heather. It's been a lot of fun.