Cousins

This is a story set in the North Carolina Mountains. It is about two families of Scotch-Irish and also French decent. It centers in on one 11 year old girl and her 6 year old sister and two boy cousins, one is 12 and the other one is 8 years old. The story begins in the year 1914. The author got many of the story ideas for this book from an elderly lady who was doing an oral history for the Rural Life Museum Director at the college where the author of this book studied teaching. The author worked in the library. But this sweet lady decided she wanted to write her story and she requested someone to illustrate it and this is what brought the two together. While the elderly lady wrote her local history book, the college asked the author and the lady to do an Elderhostel Class for the college. The elderly lady told the author many stories she did not put in her book. One of these stories became “the Fire” and another “the Grandfather”. There really was a Frenchman who came to this community with his trained monkey and an organ grinder. And that monkey is really buried in the family cemetery. The author also included stories that her father told her such as “the Ghost”. This story was of a haunting lady that killed her husband in the early 1800s. She was hung for it in 1838 and this too is a true story from these mountains.