An Account of the Peregrinations of an Ordinary Farm Family (the northern branch of the Virginia line of the Pound/s family) Following the Westward Movement from Virginia to Kansas with a Glimpse of Oklahoma Territory and Literary Sides Trails Along the Way, Including Helpful Hints for Writing a Family History.
Excerpt
My great-grandmother Bertie Olson was a Swede, and all of us Swedes are descended from the Queen of Sweden. I know this for a fact because Mildred Gunkel (née Jenkins), a scion of the line in Coyle Oklahoma (pop. 337), stood on her very own front porch one August afternoon with the dust stirring on the blackjack leaves and told me so.
I was compelled to believe this because, as she informed me, she had a chest dating from about the time of Leviticus which had been handed down from son to son, generation to generation, until it got to her. She was just keeping it until her grandson grew into it. “It’s small,” she said, “about half the size of a cigar box. A little red box, the red chippin off and everything. It's really not very pretty. One leg comes off. But there's not a nail in it." I could take her word for for all of this because the chest was upstairs in the attic at the moment she was speaking, and she told me so herself.
Perhaps its knowing that the purple is already there pumping in my bloodline that makes me so comfortable with the Farmer Principle of Family History which I am just about to spring upon an unsuspecting world. When a man knows he’s descended from the Queen, he doesn’t have to fret about small potatoes like dukes and earls.
