Taneya Koonce | Stories Waiting to be Found

Stories in Our Roots 0:03
Welcome to the Stories in Our Roots podcast. I'm your host Heather Murphy. In this podcast, we dive deep into how knowing the stories of our ancestors can make a difference in our lives today. Discovering our family history is more than a hobby. It is a way to connect deeply with ourselves, those we love and the world around us.

Heather Murphy 0:26
Hello, and welcome to Stories in Our Roots. I am Heather Murphy. I am glad that you are here today listening and I am excited to share with you the interview I had with Taneya Koonce, we had a great discussion about stories that she was able to add into her family history, how at the beginning of her family history, she was all about collecting the dates and all the data. But as she evolved in her experience, she really started to go for those stories. We talked about several different stories and they all come from different sources. There's just so many places that you can find stories that either talk about your ancestors or they give you a better understanding of what their lives might have been like about events that they may have experienced or read about in the papers or heard about as they talked with other community members to NEOs research is a great example of all the different places you can find stories. Here's the interview with Taneya Koonce. Today I am here with Taneya and I am so excited to talk with her and learn some of her stories of how family history has been a part of her life, tinea. Could you please introduce yourself?

Taneya Koonce 1:38
Absolutely. Hi, Heather, I want to thank you for inviting me to join you on the podcast. This is exciting. I really enjoy the episodes you've done in hearing other stories, and I'm looking forward to sharing some of my own. As far as about me. Well, I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and I've been here for about 20 years, I grew up in North Carolina. And I love researching my family history. I've been doing it for about 15 years now. And it has been one of the most rewarding activities that I think I could have ever engaged in. Most of my family is from North Carolina. So I spend a lot of time researching those records. I also have done a lot of helping others through my volunteer activities. I volunteer with many societies, including the Nashville chapter, the afro American Historical and Geological Society. I volunteer with the US genweb project by having counties that I helped coordinate in North Carolina, Tennessee, some in Florida, and other states in the overall project and connecting with others online and just helping where I can. It's been a lot of fun.

Heather Murphy 2:48
Well, that's great. Now how did you start becoming interested in researching your family?

Taneya Koonce 2:54
I started seriously researching. Like I said about 15 years ago, after I came across some family information that I've recorded in the past that come from my grandmother's. And by this point, they both had Alzheimer's. So I knew I wasn't going to be able to go back and ask them additional questions. So I thought well, what can I do to research what they told me see if I can document it, and still, you know, keep track and maintain these stories and find more stories? So I started calling family members, I started looking online. And as they say the story was over from there. I just became obsessed.

Heather Murphy 3:33
What were some of those first stories that you discovered that kind of caught your attention?

Taneya Koonce 3:38
Oh, wow. Let's see. Well, one of the things that my grandmother had told me, one of my grandmother's, my maternal grandmother, was that we were related to Charles Barkley. And that he comes to some of the family reunions. So I actually made that one of my missions is to see if I could verify. And I was able to verify it, after a few months of talking with family members and getting documents and different family members from those reunions and being able to trace the tree. So I was able to document that. Yes, I am, in fact related to Charles Barkley. But that was an interesting story. No, but that was a story that she told me that I just was thrilled to be able to document right and to find that verification, but that goes along with what she said.

Heather Murphy 4:27
Yeah, cuz that's fun, cuz it gives you kind of a purpose of Yes. And as a question you can answer not just research your family tree, and you don't have a time to get done with that. So

Taneya Koonce 4:39
Right, right, what's kind of nice, yeah, it's a good example of going through that research process, as you said, you have a question. And then you have to figure out how you get to the answers to those questions, and document what you find. get an answer and then it's on to the next one.

Heather Murphy 4:55
What other stories have you found that have been meaningful to you?

Taneya Koonce 4:58
Oh, my goodness, I have so Many of you know, I have a blog, and the blog has actually been a great way for me to document what I'm finding, and document exactly some of these discoveries. I think having these stories early on, fuels you to keep going, right, because you're discovering story after story. So one that I discovered early on, it's also my grandmother saw the family, my maternal grandmother, she had a brother, who was in World War Two. And when I started doing family history, my mother would tell me things, and she was telling me information about this uncle of hers. And one of the things that she told me was, he came home from the war, and he had been in Pearl Harbor, and told the family, if you have anything to ask me about what I experienced, ask me now, because I'm never going to talk about it again. And he never did. Like from that moment forward. You could not get him to talk about his military experience. It's what my mother was telling me. He just, it was a closed book. Well, he passed away, actually, right when I was beginning my journey and a family history. And I never met him. I never knew him. But he passed away in December of 2005. And I was just getting started around September, October 2005. So I didn't even have really a chance to reach out to him. But he passed away. And I started researching his, his history. And one of the things I did was order his military records, because I was just learning all the things on how you start doing research. And I learned, oh, order military records with someone who's been in the military. So I did and it took, it took about six weeks, eight weeks to get them back, because it was snail mail. But when I got them back, there was an entire outline of every shift. He'd served on the dates in which he served on them, descriptions of things that happened to him while he was in service. And I noticed that one of the entries indicated that he'd been hospitalized after being rescued off the USS neosho. So I thought, Okay, what happened? So I started researching the history of the USS Neil show, learned that, yes, that he was on that boat at the time of Pearl Harbor, not to let's see, how do I say this? He was on the USS neosho, during World War Two had been in Pearl Harbor, but you know, continued to travel around on the boat. But what happened that I really think was a major reason why he never talked about what happened to him during his service as the USS neosho, was struck, and blown up. And 80% of the crew died. He was one of 123 members that survived, that were pulled out of the water The day after the boat was hit. And it was from all accounts that I read, had to be very horrifying. Then I located online, an archive that a gentleman put together of his own family father and his military experience. And his uncle had also been on the USS neosho When that happened, and also was one of the survivors. And he videotaped his uncle talking about what happened that day. So I was I have a video account of what happened that day on the USS neosho, from another one of my uncle's crew members. And how you get much more personal than that? I don't know. But I fully understand. He must have gone through a lot. No wonder he didn't want to talk about it.

Heather Murphy 8:47
And did your grandmother other family members know the details that you had found?

Taneya Koonce 8:53
No. My grandmother at this time she had Alzheimer's. So I couldn't ask her. My mother did not know. My uncles did not know. Now, I do have a cousin that may have known I actually haven't talked to him about it. But my mother certainly didn't know. And she was very close to this particular uncle. He lives in California. So he just didn't talk about it.

Heather Murphy 9:16
So you're able to kind of recreate that part of his story that he couldn't tell.

Taneya Koonce 9:22
Yes. And the activity of all these ships during World War Two and where they were and the battles they were in, I learned a lot during that time period.

Heather Murphy 9:32
But then that's neat, too, that you're able to find personal accounts, not just necessarily the muster rolls or when they served on different ships by blessing of the internet, you could find that video that you found.

Taneya Koonce 9:46
Exactly right. That's the benefit of what happens when people are sharing of their own family discoveries is that you help others benefit from that too.

Heather Murphy 9:56
Yeah, and even though your great uncle wasn't part of that story like by name, it still was able to help you understand his story.

Taneya Koonce 10:07
You're exactly right.

Heather Murphy 10:08
That's important for people to keep in mind that there's these shared experiences that you might be able to learn something from.

Taneya Koonce 10:16
Exactly.

Heather Murphy 10:17
And I think that goes right along with you mentioned that you found a WPA slave narrative.

Taneya Koonce 10:24
Oh, yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking about. Oh, my goodness. Yes. Okay, so the Works Progress Administration, as many of your audience probably knows that a set of interviews, I think, in the 13th, with individuals that have been formerly enslaved, to capture their stories. Now, some of these stories, you absolutely cannot take completely at face value, how they're describing the context of what they live through. However, they are full of factual information that can be helpful to you. And so I've had, I've had discoveries, oh, my goodness, so many different ways. But there are three slave narratives in particular, that had been relevant to some of the family history, the one I want to share today has to do with someone, someone on my husband's side of the family. And I had been reading through slave narratives for a while. And one day, I just decided to search geographically, because you can search by surname, so you can search by location. So I searched you geographically for any story that mentioned Evansville, Indiana. So this is where my husband's family is from. And I started reading through some and read the narrative of an individual. And I thought, Oh, wait, I know this name. And so I started reading his story a little bit more closely. So his name was George Ford. And in his narrative, he is describing his family history and the experiences that he had. And it was illuminating, to say the least he described how his name had been changed when he was a young boy, census taker had come around to enumerate the family and ask them what his name was. And the family gave the name. But that census taker said, No, you can't have that name. Now, the reason this happened is because he was named after his white father, who had been his slave holder. And the census taker did not approve of this young black boy, having the same name as the white father. So told him told the family they were going to reverse his name. So his name as an adult was George Ford. But he was named Ford, George. Now, the circumstances of his birth, he also described Well, okay, let me back up. Before I talk about the circumstances of his birth, let me talk about his family. He described how he was the son of a white man, and a Native American Indian woman, and his mother's family were all Indians. And her mother was not born enslaved, but had become enslaved. While traveling, I think he said, on the trail of tears, had been forced along the trail of tears, and ended up on a plantation and became the property of the plantation owner, because that's where they ended up. The slaves on the plantation had taken her and her family in, they had nowhere else to go. So she became a slave at that point, he himself was the descendant of an American woman in a white man. He also was a byproduct of incest, and that his biological father was the half brother of his mother. And he grew up knowing this, he describes as in his slave narrative, the family all knew it. And I just thought, this is not information that you would get any other way. And he goes on to talk about how he never felt less than in terms of being the byproduct of this relationship, the white family. Okay, so his biological father wasn't as nice to him as could be. But his biological grandmother, the white woman, took him and had him educated with the other white kids. She, quote, unquote, looked out for him. But to have him tell that story, in his own words, was quite a discovery. Yeah. And it was able to take me back several more generations on his tree because he named four generations back of his ancestors. And knowing the white family was able to take that back too.

Heather Murphy 14:47
That's amazing. I'll ask you later, and we'll put in the show notes where people can find those WPA records. That might be something that somebody hadn't heard of before.

Taneya Koonce 14:58
Yes, and I would be glad to share that Because another example of how they can be relevant as a different slave story, that narrative that I found where this was a story told about an incident that occurred at a plantation that I know my ancestors were at, or while they were owned by a white family who had several plantations close in the region. So my ancestors I know, were on one of their plantations, and in the slave narrative is a story of something that happened at one of the other plantation. So, same exact time period. So I know my ancestors would have known about this incident that was described, again, shared experiences.

Heather Murphy 15:34
Yeah.

Stories in Our Roots 15:36
This podcast is brought to you by my signature service and one on one program Resilience in Your Roots. Do you find yourself overwhelmed with stressors and responsibilities of life, increasing your resilience, that ability to get back up when life knocks you down, helps you live your best life, resilience in your roots will help you in four areas to increase your resilience, self awareness and self care, purpose and goals, connections and relationships, perspective and optimism all as you learn how to research your family tree and absorb the lessons that are contained in the stories in your family. If this sounds like the perfect program for you jump on a call with me at heathermurphygenealogy.com\nextstepcall.

Heather Murphy 16:21
Sometimes I think we get in a rush to look at just our ancestors, but like you did you took time to read them, even if they didn't have your ancestors in it, but they're in the same area to get a feel for those shared experiences.

Taneya Koonce 16:36
Yes, indeed. Because that's how we flesh out the names and dates that we have are not trees, they're not just names and dates. There are people like us with stories like us.

Heather Murphy 16:45
What other records have you used to help find those stories that you wouldn't have found elsewhere.

Taneya Koonce 16:51
So I love newspapers. I'm a big fan of Historical Newspapers. And I actually this was a story of a newspaper article that was gifted to me, on my father's side of the family, he has a great, great uncle. And I've been told that this particular gentleman had saved a train from wrecking back in, I want to say like 1910, sometimes on my days off, but the oral story was, he had saved the train from wrecking. Therefore, passengers did not get hurt, because he'd saved this train. And to reward him. The train company gave him a lifetime pass to ride the railroad. Now, this was an oral story that I had, and I hadn't thought to try and confirm it. But I did blog about this particular family member of mine, a little bit about him a little bit about his wife because I had a discovery about her using yearbooks. So I've done some blogging about him. Well, I get an email one day from a historian of the county where my family is from. And he writes, and he says, to me, I found your blog post about your relative, I thought you'd be interested in this. And he got to tell me his story. He'd been a county historian for 35 years, I think it was. And he'd known about this story of my ancestors saving this train because he'd had a newspaper clipping of it. And he'd spent 30 years trying to research who this man was. Now, in the newspaper clippings he had he had two or three. The last name was MC Longhorn, MC la who are in our film, his name is la horn, not MC la horn. So he tells me that one day he just decided to try, Lord, he's trying different variations that comes across the variation Longhorn says, Oh, wait, what if Nick Longhorn believes in the mess name? Well, if it's long horn, and searches for long horns, and finds my blog posts, and finds my family tree online? Well, I'd had a note about him having done this as being an oral story told to me by a family member. And so he writes to me and he sends me the newspaper clippings, and it tells the story. So what what happened is his name was right Longhorn. He and his wife were sleeping early morning, they heard a train coming. Well, there had been a storm that had passed through the night before and washed out. I don't know what you call them the like a section where the trains could cross over a ravine. And he knew he'd known that the storm had wiped that out. So they heard the train coming and then he realized he had to go do something. So he and his wife were able to go somehow on different different sides of the trestle and make sure and wave the conductor down right so like waving law leave and the conductor sees them and stops is meant managed to stop the train. There were 400 passengers on board. So had they not stopped the train would have wrecked and all those passengers you know, some of them might have gotten hurt. So in the story describes that the train company, the first thing they did was raise a collection from all the passengers To give to him in, you know, honor of him helping, but they only raised $25. So the editor of the local newspaper ended up finding an editorial lamb blasting the train company for not valuing the lives of their passengers more than to pay $25 to my ancestor. Now, what was interesting about that is the editor of the local newspaper was politically affiliated, where they were not so kind to black people at the time, right, but he lost them. So the train company ended up doing a lot more for my relative, including offering him a job and giving him this past, he was able to ride trains for free for the rest of his life. That's what I heard. And the story is validated that the newspaper articles validated that.

Heather Murphy 20:47
That was so great. And if you wouldn't have had the blog, he wouldn't have ever found you. And you wouldn't have that newspaper article.

Taneya Koonce 20:53
Yeah. Yeah, it just goes to show. It's so important if that information out there. So he found it and was able to give that to me, and I was able to share it with my family.

Heather Murphy 21:03
Have you had any other instances like that, where you've made connections from this blog that you've shared?

Taneya Koonce 21:08
Many, many, many connections. Another example is having a picture shared with me, of a sister of one of my fourth great grandmother's, it was given to me about cousin who found me because of the blog, she was googling her family names, and came across my blog, we started corresponding. And she said, Okay, I have a picture to give you. And she sent me a picture of her ancestor who was my ancestor, sister. And I was particularly struck by the picture because I'd had a description of my ancestor from an elder in the family before he passed away. And this picture is close. I think, you know, they were sisters. And so I I can envision that this is very close to what he knew of his great grandmother to be it was what I was seeing in this picture, because of my blog.

Heather Murphy 22:02
That's great. What was it like when you started the blog? Did you feel intimidated?

Taneya Koonce 22:08
Okay, so when I started the blog, I generally I love technology, I love anything and everything technology and I have been blogging already. Before I started my genealogy blog. I had a personal family blog, but I still have up I haven't updated in years. But I had a personal family blog, and I was blogging all the time. I love technology and blogging. So I decided, Okay, I've got this new hobby, right? genealogy, you know, I'm doing a lot of work. I want to document it. So I decided to start a genealogy blog. And at first I thought, Okay, what am I gonna do it to blogs, it doesn't even make sense. But then there's such a large community, and I really wanted to connect with the genealogy community. So I wanted to keep this blog about what I was learning with genealogy. When I first started it, and the entries back in the day are a lot of lists like this week, I ordered 10 death certificates this week high retrieve these five census records. So it was more list form. And then it started to evolve into stories as I really began to dig a little deeper and uncover and try to figure out the meaning behind what I was finding. So it became less less like and more story based.

Heather Murphy 23:21
Was that reflecting how you were doing your research as well? Did it start off that you were just collecting the data, mostly?

Taneya Koonce 23:29
And it absolutely did. I was just collecting data and putting it into my software at the time. But then, as I was, and I think this change happened for me as I started to connect with family members more, so I would start calling family members asking them to share with me information, and they were telling me stories, like, you know, you call the family member and say I found this death certificate. Well, they're gonna start to tell you, oh, yeah, I remember when he died, and so on. So felt this way. And yeah, he's buried here. So I was getting stories as I was sharing facts. I said, Okay, I need to document these stories that I'm being told as well. And I think that's the evolution that many of us go through, right, as we're getting started in our family history journeys. You're excited to uncover these facts, and then you start to really go for the stories.

Heather Murphy 24:19
What is a story that you wouldn't have known? How do you not talk to one of your living family members?

Taneya Koonce 24:27
Oh, my goodness. So my paternal grandfather, he passed away when I was six months old. I'd known this my whole life. I know my parents had told me that he passed away and he died in a car wreck. He had been drinking and driving. And I knew this again, my whole life, right? You can't excuse the drinking in the driving, and it cost him his life. So I had the story that I knew this and I knew I knew what happened as far as the sequence of events. It was New Year's Eve. He'd been celebrating, but then told the people at the party, I have to go, I have to go to work. And because he worked hard, he had a family he was going to support and he wasn't going to miss work. Well, he unfortunately made the decision to go drive after celebrating New Year's Eve. So I knew this, but I was having a conversation with my grandmother one day, so this would be his wife. And she starts pulling out family papers. And she pulls out a court transcript. And she tells me that after he died, he'd had a, an accident with a taxicab driver. And so after he passed away, they'd gone to court, because they were thinking it was the fault of the taxicab driver, turned out not to be the case. But there was a court proceeding. And she had the transcript of it. And in the court proceeding, is the transcript has the person who he had the accident with describing what happened. And this gentleman describes the moment where my grandfather hit him, describes the emergency response coming after the accident, describes that my grandfather was not alive. And I'm reading this and I broke down crying. Because I'm reading a description of the moment, my grandfather passed away, like, I still cry when I think about it, or if I'm reading it, because this is the moment he passed away. And it's described from a witness account guy he had the accident with. And I know that that is not something I would have, I'm not even sure my father knew my grandmother had this transcript. That's something that I would never have thought to go look for. I don't think I ever would have come across it. Had I not been having this conversation with her and she pulls it out. It's conceivable that I may not have ever known she even had it, have we not had that conversation? Right? So I have it digitized. It's online. My family knows it's there. Like we know that we have this now. And I'm just grateful that I do have that from her. And we have this.

Heather Murphy 27:14
These have been some great stories. Thank you so much for sharing.

Taneya Koonce 27:19
I'm happy to share I you know, it is at the heart of what we do and why we do it. Yeah, to tell the stories of our ancestors, as you know, the story is in our roots.

Heather Murphy 27:29
Yeah. And that's where that's where you really get the most benefit. The the dates don't change your life. It's knowing the stories that changes you. And that helps you and

Taneya Koonce 27:39
Exactly.

Heather Murphy 27:40
Well, if you could go back and talk to yourself 15 years ago or more before you started researching your family history, what would you tell yourself?

Taneya Koonce 27:50
That's a great question, what would I tell myself 15 years ago, I think I would tell myself, to organize my work better. Because, you know, it's not a good experience, or a good feeling to come across some information and not realize where you got it from. I think that's something that happens to so many people early in their journey. They're so excited to get it. You don't think about make sure you document where you got it from. So sources are important. being organized is important. And just making sure you keep your information in a way that you know why you are coming up with because you are where you got the information from. So documentation. And I think that's why I focus so much on it now because it makes a difference. You know, whether you're going to write a book or not, it makes a difference, because here I am 15 years later. And I will go back and revisit my files and see things that I recorded, but I'm not sure where I got it from. That's so we don't want that to happen to others. So I would tell myself, document and stay organized.

Heather Murphy 29:02
Yeah, sometimes we don't want to spend that extra little bit of time to make a note. But really, especially if you're doing your work on your computer, you can just copy and paste something and attach it there. There's not many excuses is when you had to write it out by hand.

Taneya Koonce 29:18
Yes, yes. So you can set yourself up with ways to make sure you do that. But I just beg people please do that.

Heather Murphy 29:27
Yeah, it's not the fun glamorous part. But when you go back and you wonder, and you have to redo your work to find out where that information came from, you'll think yourself.

Taneya Koonce 29:37
Exactly. You will.

Heather Murphy 29:40
Well, thank you so much Taneya for talking with me. It has been great to hear your stories, and I look forward to sharing them with others.

Taneya Koonce 29:48
All right. Thank you. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to share them.

Stories in Our Roots 29:53
Thank you for joining me today for Stories in Our Roots. Please help this podcast grow by subscribing. Leave a review and sharing it with your friends. If you have feedback or would like to recommend someone to share their story head to storiesinourroots.com and fill out the form. Thanks again for listening and I look forward to being with you again next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai