By Mike Templeton
The Urban Appalachian Community Coalition’s Kith and Kin: Appalachians and the Making of Cincinnati is now fully accessible online on UACC’s new Kith and Kin website which includes both aspects of Kith and Kin, the Urban Appalachian Story Gathering Project and the Perceptions of Home exhibit. UACC member Pauletta Hansel has been a tireless force behind Kith and Kin and everything that has gone into it all, and she had this to say about this culmination in the website: “It has truly taken a village to create this robust experience for visitors to our website. In addition to our partners, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County and A Picture’s Worth, who have helped make our content possible, our Communications Specialist, Erinn Sweet, and Jim Talkington of Talkington Media have devoted countless hours to bring our digital exhibits to fruition. Last year, we were honored to receive a grant from Ohio Humanities which has helped us take this next step in sharing the many stories which make up the urban Appalachian experience.” (See last week’s post for information about how help this important funder continue its work.) The website offers a single site where scholars, researchers, and anyone with an interest in urban Appalachian life and culture can see what has been collected and preserved.
The Kith and Kin website is nearly inexhaustible, but a quick look offers a dizzying tour of urban Appalachian and Appalachian life, culture, and history provides a way of seeing the urban Appalachian experience in ways that are simply not possible in any other format. We’ll start with the Story Gathering Project, which is actually in two parts, the video interviews collected primarily in 2021-22, and the audio interviews collected in 2024 with our new partner, A Picture’s Worth. Beginning with the newest part, the individual text and audio stories paired with photographs in this collection focus on a single theme—“What does family mean to you?” This question has been used to elicit stories from generations near and far from their mountain roots. From a reflection on the ways in which the Ohio River provides a connection with a family of origin, to an exploration of a gourd dulcimer as symbolic of how family is nurtured, these short stories help show the depth and complexity of family in the 21st century. This part of Kith and Kin will continue to grow as more stories are collected and digitized.
As I dove in to the website’s Video Quilts page, I couldn’t help thinking of Judith Elsey’s book Quilts as Text(iles) as explains that the quilt is a text, it is a written document that conveys meanings in the same way a paper document printed with words conveys meanings. In this way, the quilt has served multiple purposes in societies over the centuries. It literally keeps us warm and alive, while the quilt also tells the story of the person who made it, the people from which that person comes, and the world in which they lived. This is why the word “quilt” is used to refer to the video montage of individual interviews, each of which tells a story in its own right. As a video quilt, the fragments and pieces become more than what any single piece could say on its own, and the quilt itself becomes an inexhaustible text. Clicking on the first quilt on Appalachian identity you are given a wide breadth of experiences that tells you a great many things, not the least of which is that Appalachian identity is a vastly complex concept, one which cannot be boiled down to a simple formula and certainly will not square up with a stereotype. Clicking around the various quilts is like pulling back the camera field of vision to examine an even larger quilt, the pieces and patches continue to reveal more with each one aligned against the next.
Of course, the great advantage of a website as compared to a conventional paper book is the ability to switch quickly and easily from one part of the text to another. I found it particularly instructive to click over from the Identity Quilt to the early days of the Urban Appalachian Council as it appears in Perceptions of Home, completed in 1996 as a traveling exhibit of photographs by Malcolm J. Wilson paired with text from interviews conducted by Don Corathers. As a late comer to UACC and the long history of urban Appalachia, I am drawn to these early historical features. All that preceded me in the building of so much of the urban Appalachian experience that I could easily take for granted. A great many people pushed up against a vast machine of resistance to simply clear the way for me to type away once a week on ideas that were simply not understood or accepted not so long ago. These juxtapositions on the website place experience itself in high relief and lift it out of the realm of what could otherwise be a static historical narrative.
Malcolm Wilson’s photographs of urban Appalachians are an experience in themselves. Looking at the face of Ernie Mynatt, “Papa to His People,” as the website text explains, is a powerful piece of the whole project. When I see the face of one of the most important figures in this narrative, it is more than a narrative. Ernie Mynatt and everything he did become something alive, something undeniable. On a personal note, as a (slightly) reformed trouble maker myself, I felt an instant kinship Ernie Mynatt as the text explains that “trouble maker” was one epithet among many for the man. Anyone is richly rewarded for a scroll through these photos. There are those whose faces and stories you will recognize and others who you do not know; all of them become living history with the Perceptions of Home pages of the website.
As easy as it is to fall down the rabbit hole of urban Appalachian history, a visitor to the website really should not lose sight of the fact that “the Making of Cincinnati” is included with the Kith and Kin title. Kith and Kin’s combination of the 21st century Story Gathering Project and the 20th century Perceptions of Home exhibit reveals the ways Appalachians and urban Appalachians are woven into the textile that is greater Cincinnati history and culture. It is not possible to look at any part of the history and culture of our city and not see the presence or influence of urban Appalachians.
Clicking back to the video aspect of the Story Gathering Project to watch Pauletta Hansel’s interview with Nancy Laird is illuminating because Nancy Laird has been so deeply immersed in the heart of the historically urban Appalachian neighborhood of East Price Hill that her frames of reference are often encyclopedic. Memories of urban Appalachian life are woven into her life in Cincinnati’s West Side, and we get the clear sense of how Appalachians have been a thorough-going part of Cincinnati for so long that we need to remind ourselves that we are Appalachian. Then moving back to the audio stories and photos gathered with A Picture’s Worth our understanding of what it means to be urban Appalachian is further expanded as we encounter three generations of Nancy’s family in an interview conducted at the 2024 Appalachian Festival.
Being a Cincinnatian and an urban Appalachian can often feel like the same thing. But then I found myself back in the Perceptions of Home exhibit encountering more images of the long and often heartbreaking migration from “Home” to the urban core. The weight of life can often appear on faces in Malcolm Wilson’s photographs, and the text from Don Corathers’ interviews gives insight to the experiences of these people. Clicking around, following threads and ideas, one can see small features of the images that explain so much more than words or a single image. The ways people hold onto each other is revealing. They hold each other in the way that shows love and deep connection, but their holds are relaxed, never clinging so we see a form of trust borne of a connection that spans generations and miles.
The Urban Appalachian Community Coalition has been building the Kith and Kin: Appalachians and the Making of Cincinnati project for several years now; nearly three decades when you consider the exhibit, Perceptions of Home, which has made its appearance in numerous contexts and provided countless viewers with a unique view of urban Appalachian life. What we now call Kith and Kin has gone through a continuous evolution, and a great many people have contributed their stories, and for this we are genuinely grateful. We invite you to take view, study, and enjoy all these stories in one online space at the new Kith and Kin: The Making of Cincinnati website.
The Kith and Kin: the Making of Cincinnati website can be found at this link: uacckithandkin.org/.
To read more about the creation of Kith and Kin, you may want to visit previous blog posts:
Stories and Songs: The Kith and Kin Project Links Up with the Queen City Balladeers’ Leo Coffeehouse
Jim Talkington of Talkington Media
Story Gathering Training for Kith and Kin: Appalachians and the Making of Cincinnati
“Perceptions of Home: The Urban Appalachian Spirit”: Urban Appalachian Images and Interviews
Michael Templeton is a writer, and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, published by Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, with Nut Hole Publishing. Check out his profile in UACC’s Cultural Directory. He has published numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in West Milton, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.