Did You Tell Them Who You Are?: A Hoskins Family Story

By Rebecca Hoskins Goodwin

In the early 1900s, Allen Lewis Hoskins and his siblings left Leslie County, Kentucky, and moved to Mingo County, West Virginia. After Al met and married Lucy Patterson from Franklin County, Virginia, he never could have known that more than a hundred years later, members of his extended family would quietly wonder, Where do we really come from? And how did we get to where we live today?

Rebecca Hoskins Goodwin relies on DNA, extensive research, photographs, and other personal documents to share the fascinating story of her family in the context of Appalachian history, as they progressed from immigrant to settler to farmer and from mining to law enforcement to politics. As Goodwin sets her familys lives against the backdrop of their times, it soon becomes evident that despite hardship, violence, and war, generations of the Hoskins family have relied on the strong ties of kinship to push on toward the frontier and, ultimately, the American Dream.

Did You Tell Them Who You Are? offers a compelling look back into the Hoskins family history in an effort to answer questions for not only todays generation, but also generations to come.

If you are a student of Appalachian history, you will be intrigued by how historical events affected one family. If you are looking for a pleasant read that will entertain and inform you, I recommend Did You Tell Them Who You Are? Sue Sergi, president and CEO, the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences, Charleston, West Virginia

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491701195

Rebecca Hoskins Goodwin

Rebecca Hoskins Goodwin, EdD, is a graduate of Marshall University and West Virginia University. She has spent her life as a student, teacher, and school administrator and has been honored many times for her studies and her work. She is now interested in local history and genealogy, and this is her third book of family history. Her first two books, Did You Tell Them Who You Are? A Hoskins Family Story and Who Are Her People? The Life and Family of Louise Maynard Hoskins were very well received. They were reviewed as "well-written and informative," as "well-researched and entertaining", and as" an indispensable resource for genealogists."

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Copyright © 2013 by Rebecca Hoskins Goodwin.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-0118-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-0119-5 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013914083

iUniverse rev. date: 08/21/2013

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Genographic Project

Family Tree Dna

Our European Ancestors

Coming to America

To the Frontier

Our Old Kentucky Home

The Children of Henderson Hoskins and Mary Duff Baker Hoskins

Oh, the West Virginia Hills

The Matewan Massacre

The Hoskins Families In Mingo County

The Greatest Generation

Growing Up in Mingo County

Military Service By The Family Of Allen Lewis Hoskins

World War II Letters and V-Mail

From Sea to Shining Sea

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Bibliography

About The Author

This family history is dedicated with love and gratitude to the memory of my parents, Herman and Louise Hoskins. Dad regularly asked, Did you tell ’em who you are? Dad, this is my attempt to tell ’em who we are.To our son and our beloved grandchildren, here is your history, a part of who you are. And to Jim, happy 50th anniversary with my love and gratitude.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The resources at the West Virginia and the Kentucky archives bring the past of these two states alive, and the historians who work there are friendly, courteous, and helpful. I spent many interesting hours in their company, delving into old newspapers, old court records, and in other genealogy treasures. I wish that effort guaranteed accuracy, but in a history and genealogy of this extent, there are certain to be errors. For all of these, I apologize.

The Internet has opened genealogy to many people, helping to make it the most popular hobby in America. Thanks must be given to the Hoskins researchers who share their work on Ancestry.com, on Rootsweb, on FamilyTree DNA, and on other Internet sites. Special recognition is due to Robert J. Hoskins of North Carolina, who gave generous permission to use his work in the first chapters. The research of David Hoskins of Texas; James R. Hoskins of Lithia Springs, Georgia; and Jerry D. Hoskins of Atlanta, Georgia, is the basis for the chapters on the early Hoskins generations. I have provided citations, but it must be noted that until we reach John Hoskins, none of the research is my own; it is all drawn from the work of these gentlemen.

Thanks to my siblings and my cousins, the grandchildren of Allen Lewis and Lucy Patterson Hoskins, who encouraged the project and who took the time to search their hearts, their memories, and their photographs for the stories and pictures of our parents and grandparents.

Special thanks and love to cousin Jamie Patterson, who worked so hard to collect family pictures and to make old family pictures usable in the book.

Finally, thanks to my sister, Sue, whose suggestions made the book more interesting and more readable. First, she said family stories only made sense when one understood the times in which they happened. Second, she suggested that scholarly, in-text citations interfered with the reading. As a result of her suggestions, I added the historical information about the times in which each generation of our family lived, and I have tried to faithfully cite sources, but not in the text, and in simple, not academic, formats.

INTRODUCTION

Allen Hoskins and Lucy Patterson Hoskins of Mingo County, West Virginia, were the parents of seven children—five sons and two daughters. They had twenty-three grandchildren, of whom nineteen were living in 2013, when this memoir was published. Lucy and Al’s grandchildren now have grandchildren, even great-grandchildren, of our own. We are scattered far from the hills of Mingo County, scattered from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from north to south, from the city to the country. The purpose of this family memoir is to record our family’s history for our children and grandchildren. Even more so, we hope to collect our memories of our parents and grandparents, in order to help us recall, and our children understand, from whence and from whom we came. In other words, to tell them who we are.

The modern line of our Hoskins family came from Harlan and Leslie County, Kentucky, and Mingo County, West Virginia. These counties of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia are part of a broad, ill-defined region called Appalachia—specifically a part of Appalachia known as the Cumberland or the Allegheny Plateau. It is a land of streams and valleys, of creeks and hollows, but above all, it is a land of coal.

Coal has always cursed the land in which it lies. When men begin to wrest it from the earth it leaves a legacy of foul streams, hideous slag heaps and polluted air. It peoples this transformed land with blind and crippled men and with widows and orphans. It is an extractive industry which takes all away and restores nothing. It mars but never beautifies. It corrupts but never purifies.

But the tragedy of the Kentucky mountains transcends the tragedy of coal. It is compounded of Indian wars, civil war and intestine feuds, of layered hatreds, and of violent death. To its sad blend, history has added the curse of coal as a crown of sorrow.¹

In the 1700s, Virginia signed a pact with the Iroquois nation concerning lands in western Virginia. The Indians later insisted that the pact gave only the land east of the mountains to Virginia, while the Virginians took the position that the treaty gave them the land all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In the 1740s, the British king gave a large grant of land in the Ohio Valley to the Ohio Company, one of whose members was George Washington. This was the first of several companies developed for the purpose of investing in western lands. Surveyors began working the western lands to define competing claims, and the seeds of conflict over land were sown—conflict that continued through settlement and into the commercial development of timber and coal.

Making inroads into the mountains was no easy task. One of the first English explorers, Robert Fallam, wrote in his journal in 1671, It was a pleasing tho’ dreadful sight to see mountains and Hills as if piled one upon another.² In the late 1700s, as explorers began to move into western Virginia, the French began building a series of forts. The great Iroquois confederacy had long been allies of the British, but the tribes in the Eastern Woodlands tended to favor the French. They believed the French were fairer than the British, and they realized that French trappers did not have the voracious appetite for land that the British settlers had. Conflict inevitably followed. In Europe, this conflict between France and England was called the Seven Years War. Here it is called the French and Indian War, and through the mid-1700s, it led to bloody skirmishes not only between the armies, but between the growing number of settlers and the Indians.

In 1775, Daniel Boone blazed a trail known as the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, from North Carolina and Tennessee into Kentucky. At first, the trail was only passable on foot or horseback, and the Native Americans, particularly the Shawnee, resisted the settlements in this land. After fifty years of conflict with Indians and between land speculators, Kentucky became a state in 1792, and the new state approved funds to improve the Wilderness Road. By 1796, an improved road was opened for wagon and carriage travel. In the early 1800s, after being charged as an accessory in the murder of James Milligan in Washington County, North Carolina (now Tennessee), John Hoskins, along with his wife, Ruth Lloyd, their five sons, and other relatives, followed the Wilderness Road to eastern Kentucky.

The bloody fighting during the settlement of Kentucky and western Virginia was only the beginning of conflict in this area. The Civil War in this territory was indeed brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor; this was the land where North met South, and loyalties were deeply divided. The civil war gave birth to a new state, West Virginia, and that too created controversy, particularly in southern West Virginia. Even after the war, outbreaks of fighting continued between guerrilla bands, former militias, in West Virginia and Kentucky. These skirmishes were contributing factors to the age of feuds that followed the Civil War.

Disputes from the war and disputes over land gave rise to years of feuds between mountain families in Kentucky. The most famous of these feuds was, of course, the Hatfield and McCoy feud, a fight that gained particular attention because it crossed state lines between Pike County, Kentucky and Logan—now Mingo—County, West Virginia. The governors, police, and judiciary of two states became involved, leading to national press coverage and much notoriety.

As the mountain feuds gradually ended, this troubled land was torn again with the development of timber and coal. This changed the culture of the Cumberland Plateau from one of small family farms to one of small towns and coal camps. Moreover, the growth of King Coal led to attempts by miners to protect themselves by forming unions. The effort to organize the miners opened another wave of conflict, the Coal Wars—bloody battles between the miners and the mine companies. The Mingo County Coal Wars, including one of the most notorious battles, the Matewan Massacre, occurred when Allen Hoskins and his family lived in Mingo County, and Al was working as a constable.

Battles with the Indians, Civil War, mountain feuds, and the Coal Wars were the heritage of the people of the coal counties of West Virginia and Kentucky. Indeed, this turbulent history gave the same nickname to two of the counties where our family lived—Bloody Harlan and Bloody Mingo.

In the early 1900s, Allen Lewis Hoskins, his brothers, Remine, John, Robert, and Farmer, and his sister, Martha, left Leslie County, Kentucky, and moved to Mingo County, West Virginia. There Al met and married pretty Lucy Patterson from Franklin County, Virginia. Lucy’s family genealogy is summarized in appendix C. It is Al’s family history, Lucy and Al’s story, and that of their children, which this book will tell.

THE GENOGRAPHIC PROJECT

Where do we really come from? And how did we get to where we live today? DNA studies suggest that all humans today descend from a group of African ancestors who—about sixty thousand years ago—began a remarkable journey. The National Geographic Genographic Project is seeking to chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species by using sophisticated laboratory and computer analysis of DNA contributed by hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. In this unprecedented, real-time research effort, the Genographic Project is closing the gaps of what science knows today about humankind’s ancient migration stories.³

Deep Ancestry: The Genetic History of Herman Ray Hoskins

It has been the custom in our immediate family to draw names for Christmas. Several years ago, knowing my interest in genealogy, my sister, Sue, gave me a DNA test kit for the National Geographic Genographic Project. While my family was interested in the results of this test, we learned that female testing uses mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and traces the female line. To learn about our father’s family, the Hoskins family, we needed to test a male descendant. Herman Ray Hoskins Jr., known in the family as Rocky, is the grandson of Al and Lucy Hoskins. In 2010, he is one of two surviving grandsons who are male descendants of sons of Al and Lucy. His male Hoskins line is: Herman, Allen, Henderson, John III, John Jr., John Sr., Thomas Hoskinson Jr., Thomas Hodkinson/Hoskinson, and John Hodgkinson. As a male descendant, his Y-chromosome DNA testing shows us the migratory history of our deep paternal ancestors. Rocky agreed to participate in the Genographic Project, not only once but twice. In September 2012, we received the first report, GENO 1.0, and in April 2013, we received the second report, GENO 2.0.

It is important to understand that these studies are not genealogical studies. Rather, Geno 1.0 revealed the anthropological story of our ancestors—where they lived and how they migrated around the world over tens of thousands of years. The GENO 2.0 autosomal results revealed insights into recent admixture over the past six generations but is still not a complete genealogy study.⁴

GENO 1

⁵

About fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens, including our earliest ancestor, emerged from Africa. The person who carried the first genetic marker in our lineage moved through the Sahara, which was then habitable, and followed the game to new territories. He was part of the early human ancestors when language developed, and along with language, growth in intellect. The next genetic marker in our lineage appeared about forty-five thousand years ago. This ancestor may have been born in Northern Africa or in the Middle East, as he followed the animals out of Africa and into Central Asia. The third genetic marker, which appeared about forty thousand years ago, is found in a large lineage known as the Eurasian Clan. The descendants of this man populated much of the planet. The Eurasian Clan spread until they reached the mountains of Asia, where some moved north and others moved south to the Indian subcontinent, resulting in separate lineages.

Our next ancestor’s genetic marker emerged about thirty-five thousand years ago in Central Asia. His line had moved in the steppes of Eurasia. About this time, the Ice Age glaciers began to move south. To exist, our ancestor and his clan learned to sew clothes from animal skins and to build shelters. This man is the ancestor of most Europeans and Native Americans. About thirty thousand years ago, a member of this clan, with our next genetic marker on his Y chromosome, became the progenitor of the modern humans who moved to Europe.

Our ancestors who arrived in Europe competed with Neanderthals for resources and eventually established themselves in this land. They survived the Ice Age, and their genetic markers were carried to northern France and to the British Isles. Along with about 70 percent of the men in southern England, our family belongs to haplogroup R1b. The defining marker of our haplogroup appeared about thirty thousand years ago. It showed that our early ancestor was Cro-Magnon, the people responsible for the cave paintings in France and for jewelry and early musical instruments. It is from one of these early humans that our modern English ancestors descended.

GENO 2.0

The Genographic Project explains the GENO 2.0 test thus:

We are all more than the sum of our parts, but the results below offer some of the most dramatic and fascinating information in your Geno 2.0 test. In this section, we display your affiliations with a set of nine world regions. This information is determined from your entire genome so we’re able to see both parents’ information, going back six generations. Your percentages reflect both recent influences and ancient genetic patterns in your DNA due to migrations as groups from different regions mixed over thousands of years. Your ancestors also mixed with ancient, now extinct hominid cousins like Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East or the Denisovans in Asia. If you have a very mixed background, the pattern can get complicated quickly! ⁶

According to the autosomal DNA test, Herman Hoskins Jr.’s, genetic groups are Northern European, Mediterranean, and Southwest Asian. His results compare to others in the British Isles reference group as follows:⁷

In addition to the analysis of our human heritage, the GENO 2.0 test also analyzed related hominid DNA. This result showed 2.2 percent Neanderthal and 3.0 percent Denisovan.⁸ The Genographic Project explains this as follows:

When our ancestors first migrated out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, they were not alone. At that time, at least two other species of hominid cousins walked the Eurasian landmass: Neanderthals and Denisovans. Most non-Africans are about 2% Neanderthal. The Denisovan component of your Geno 2.0 results is more experimental, as we are still working to determine the best way to assess the percentage Denisovan ancestry you carry. ⁹

FAMILY TREE DNA

As interesting as it may be to read of our earliest ancestors, the Genographic Project does not shed light on our recent genealogy. For that purpose, I submitted Rocky’s (Herman Hoskins Jr.) GENO 1.0 DNA test to Family Tree DNA and to Ancestry DNA, which are services dedicated to helping genealogists when their paper trail hits a brick wall.¹⁰ Family Tree DNA matched Rocky’s test at the twelve, twenty-five, and thirty-seven marker levels with that of other men who had submitted tests. While there were no matches that confirmed without doubt the common ancestor that these men shared, the paper evidence strongly pointed to Thomas Hoskinson of Prince George County, Maryland, as our common