This story is excerpted from a workshop conducted in Yancey County, North Carolina in September 2026 with Gena Girard.

My grandmother was born in Yancey County. She was a Hughes, and I found out that so was my grandfather, Hughes, but they were from Mitchell County, and they lived on the border where my dad was born, and in Yancey County. I didn’t know as much about his family as I did my mother. She was a town person, lived in the first time, so she wanted to travel when he got out of World War II, he was a World War II hero. He was sent in with the troops that were killed to replace them. He was like 20 years old. He bought my mother’s wedding rings in Hawaii, and he had shrapnel in his head for the- they continued to attack the Japanese, and they flew into the ship next to him. He was in the hole. They were all crawling that one way ladder up to get out of there, because they knew those Japanese planes would destroy them if they could. They flew into a ship that was next to him just as he came out of the hole, and the plane’s shrapnel went right here, and he had a bump on his head because they were afraid to remove it because of where I was, but that’s what I knew. He would climb the walls. He had nightmares. I remember that trying to get out of the hole. Mom said, “Don’t wake him, let him be.” But they went up north and raised me up north. I went to school up there, but when I- I wanted always on living East Haram, and found out in ancestry that my name should have been Hughes and not Gardner. A preacher adopted my grandfather when he was orphan, and changed his name to his, which was Gardner, and that’s the name I have as a maiden name, and it’s I’ve always been fascinated with history because of that, I knew my grandmother was born in Burnsville. She was a Hughes, and so was her husband’s father. It’s just- it’s interesting, and I’m fascinated with history.