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He wrote one about my great-great-grandfather Luther Hughes Kinnaird. Luther came to Alabama from Arkansas because he killed a man with a knife at a party. His father, William, put him on a horse and pointed him toward Alabama and relatives he had there. He told him never to come back and as far as I know he did not. By all accounts Luther was a very mean man. My great-grandfather Joseph William Kinnaird I (namesake of me and Billy Kinnaird) did not have good stories to tell my father about him. He killed one of his sons by pushing him down the stairs of the ancestral home in Bibb County. Walter (the son) was born with a club foot. Apparently this precluded him from working the fields with any degree of efficiency. Walter is buried in the family cemetary which is in the front yard of ancestral home. My father believes that the land is cursed because of the actions of Luther. There is still the taint of evil visited on future generations because of Luther. (It must be noted that my father is a big fan of Faulkner and Faulkner is big on sins being punished in future generations. But then again so is the Bible.)
Hearing these stories and thinking of other stories (my great-grandmother, Bertha, might have been a midwife that performed abortions way back in the day prompting her to become somewhat nutty in the other extreme about religion later on in her life) makes me wonder if all families have these types of skeletons in their closets or is it just the Kinnairds.
These stories do make me feel I might be more normal than I have been prone to think.
What kind of stories does your family have? At least the ones that you can tell because the statute of limitations has run out or the people involved are long dead.