KEY WEST

Key West is for most people a charming tourist trap as far south as you can go in the US. For me it is an ancestral home. My family originally were English plantation owners who settled in the Carolina's. When the Revolutionary War escalated, they kept their loyalties to England as Tories. Unwilling to fight against their neighbors nor against their British relatives, they fled to the Bahamas and were given land grants from England. Some of my ancestors must have fought on the colonist side of the war for I do qualify as a DAR.

They sought to raise cotton there as they had in the Carolina's but the lime soil made cotton a poor choice. My ancestor, William Curry left the Bahamas ( Green Turtle Cay) in 1837 at the age 16 and went to Key West to seek his fortune.

Have you ever seen a weirder beard?

He was enterprising if not terribly honest according to family rumor. Some historians paint him as an astute business man but I prefer the racier version my family clung to. There is a 12 mile reef around Key West that was hazardous to shipping vessels. When a ship became stranded on a reef, the wrecker was a man who rescued the crew and claimed salvage of the cargo. The first wrecker to the rescue got 1/3 of the spoils.

Where my multiple great grandfather got creative was when he was rumored to have hired the pilots to ram the ships on the reef. Thus he knew where and when to claim salvage. He opened a large dry goods store that had virtually no over head and along with being stock market savvy, he became Florida's first millionaire. Little known fact is that around 1860, Key West was Florida's largest city.

My mother was the last to enjoy the fruits of his labor. She knew and enjoyed the wealth but her father pretty much made short work of it. I just have some lovely heirlooms to remind me of the day.

All of my family except myself, were born in Key West. My mother suffered severe asthma and Key West was killing her. My father loaded up the family ( I was a bun in the oven) and swore he would drive till she could breathe easily. Who would have thought that Youngstown Ohio was where mother would draw easy breaths. A steel mill town with soot that turned snow gray was where she could breathe. Go figure. That was where I became the only Yankee born into the family in 8 generations.

We went back to Key West when I was 10 for mother deeply missed her home and family. I was able for a few years to get to know and understand my roots before her asthma made us move again. I was grateful for the time I got to spend there. It truly was a paradise in those days and I learned to appreciate the self sufficient island people whose genes I carried. There will be stories of Key West in the future so this is just a little background chatter.

Any rascals in your family tree??