WNC Families and Beyond Featured in Recently Published Genealogy
Fascinated with extensive family history, Belinda Smart Carringer embarked on a genealogical journey 30 years ago. The result is Smart Travels: The Multicentury Genealogy of Joseph Smart Sr., a 691-page collaborative effort that includes not only census information, but oral history accounts, newspaper articles, maps, photographs, an annotated letter, and more. Smart Travels follows the courageous trek of Joseph Smart Sr. as he traversed down what was the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania to settle eventually in North Carolina.
People featured in the book experienced every noteworthy American occurrence, from the Revolutionary war to the Civil War at home as well as the impact of the two great world wars abroad. Plus, there are true tales of wild west shootouts, odd natural disasters – such as when a lightning bolt struck a church during a service and killed parishioners – as well as murders, fluke accidents, and tragic injustices.
Said Carringer in the book's Epilogue, "... I have marveled at all the significant events, achievements, characters, tragedies, and much more in the generations before me."
Smart Travels does not just tell Carringer's history; it tells of American history. And, although her lineage is spelled out in its pages, many readers throughout Western North Carolina and beyond may learn of something of their own descendants, or people who knew them, in places like Franklin, Asheville, Fairview, Black Mountain, Old Fort, Rutherfordton, and surrounding counties and states. Some of the Smarts even settled en masse in areas of Mississippi and Texas.
Noteworthy for Macon County is a section on Whipple Carpenter Smart, whose home has been preserved at Mainspring Conservation Trust's Tessentee Bottomlands Preserve. Carringer writes: "I think each of us has someone in our family who stands out. Whipple is that for me. Even though I never got to meet him, since he died in 1946, 14 years before I was born, I 'met' him 30 years ago when I first started researching my relatives." Significantly, Whipple was married to Mary Elizabeth Silver, whose first cousin (once removed) was Charles (Charlie) Silver, the murdered and dismembered husband of Frankie Silver, whose infamous 1833 guilty verdict and hanging caused a stir then and has spawned books and films since.
As is stated in Smart Travels' Prologue: "What readers will begin to comprehend through the reading and understanding of these records is the tenacity, ambition, and courage that shaped individual generations as well as how these family members contributed to the fabric of the nation."
ABOUT BELINDA CARRINGER: Belinda and her husband, Donnie, have been farming for 13 years on eight acres in the Mountain Grove community of Macon County, N.C. The couple retired from their careers to grow and sell produce to upscale restaurants throughout Western North Carolina.
