My Great-Great-Uncle (b. 1909) Tells about the Sleigh Bells Belonging to his Grandfather (b. 1860)

In this audio clip, my great-great-uncle Clarence Raymond “Mike” Magill (1909–1992) tells about the sleigh bells that belonged to his grandfather, my third great-grandfather Edward Curtis Magill (1860–1939), with the sleigh bells on hand for a demonstration. This was recorded by my Grandpa Ray Kegley on his VHS camcorder on Christmas Day, December 25, 1990, when Uncle Clarence was 81 and I was 11. Unfortunately, the video has degraded into static, but the audio is still in perfect shape. I was there when this story was told—my voice can be heard here and there—but I have no memory of the occasion.

On the other hand, I have fond memories of Uncle Clarence, although we were not close. He died in 1992, when he was 83 and I was 13. He was a voracious reader, a lover of history, and a wellspring of family lore. Since I became the guardian of the Magill family papers and photographs, I have realized how indebted we are to Uncle Clarence—for his copious notes on the backs of photos and on scraps of cardboard, without which we would have no idea of the identities of many of the people pictured. He had the same annotating, archiving, conserving instincts and tendencies as I have—and with everything he had in his head, he would scarcely have needed Ancestry.com even if it had existed! I wish now that I could sit down with Uncle Clarence, pen and paper in hand—with a digital camera recording in the background. When I was a boy, I remember hearing our ancestors’ names mentioned, but I found it all so confusing… how could I keep track of them all? How could I remember who was related to who? It was easier not to think about it. But now, bitten by the genealogy bug, I aspire to know what Uncle Clarence knew and to pass it along to future generations.

Uncle Clarence’s way of speaking is a window into the linguistic history of Indiana. He was born into a family that had lived within the same few square miles of Johnson County, Indiana—known as the Hurricane community—for five generations, since they came from eastern Tennessee in 1829. The local dialect is an amalgam of predominantly southern forms of US English brought to Indiana in the 1820s and 30s by settlers from (especially) Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky—with some northern influence added to the mix. Our family is lucky enough to preserve a remarkable collection of 23 original letters written during the Civil War by six different soldiers, all from Hurricane. Their informal usage and ad hoc spellings offer telling clues to their pronunciation and syntax, such as the universal use of “was” as a past tense of “to be” (e.g., “we was, they was”) or the reduction in the number of parts of irregular verbs (e.g., “we come” for “we came” [cf. “we have come”]; “I seen” for “I saw” [cf. “I have seen”]; “she give” for “she gave” [cf. “she has given”]). Notably, in just under four minutes, Uncle Clarence displays no fewer than nine of the same syntactic and phonetic features as our corpus of 1860s letters. His speech was undoubtedly not identical to mid-19th century Indiana English—language is constantly evolving—but it certainly developed organically from it and showed clear signs of continuity with it. Thus, if you want to know how mid-1800s Indiana pioneers and their descendants sounded, Uncle Clarence’s way of speaking is an excellent demonstration of much that we know for sure about the earlier dialect. That old music has faded a bit with each generation as we have progressively come under the influence of standard American English. But given the right context, sometimes I still surprise myself at the spontaneous “Hoosier twang” I can produce. In the video, the same music can be heard in the voice of my great-grandmother Marguerite Magill and, to a lesser degree, in the voices of my grandmother Ann Kegley and my great-aunt Sue Price.

Uncle Clarence’s everyday speech was scarcely influenced at all by standard or literary English, but he was nonetheless an educated and well-read man. This is an important reminder that speaking a regional dialect as a first language has nothing to do with intellectual capacity or educational achievement, in spite of the value judgments that frequently fall on certain speech patterns.

If you'd like to know more about how Uncle Clarence's dialect compares to the language represented in our corpus of 23 Civil War letters (written 1861–64 by six soldiers from the same small area where Uncle Clarence was born in 1909), click on the following link to view a PDF file with more details: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17JX-....