When I was in high school in New York, my favorite book was The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner's Nobel Prize winning novel about a disintegrating Southern family. Twenty years later, I married a Southern man and moved to Alabama. My husband often told me about his father's side of the family who had lived in Tennessee. The story was colorful and sad. His great grandmother, Mamaw, was left widowed with six young children after her husband was shot by a neighbor in a border dispute over one of his five farms. A sepia toned photo of Mamaw and her children, all smiling grimly in their Sunday best, hangs in our den. Before the children were grown, the money was gone, and the once proud family declined with alcoholism, bootlegging, gambling, bribery, murder, and incest just like the families in Faulkner's books.
Ten years ago, my husband's cousin who dabbled in genealogy, discovered we might be related to William Faulkner's mother through Mamaw. Both women shared the same maiden name, Butler, and they had lived in the same small Mississippi town at the same time.
