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Having recently read a book about the Hatfields and McCoys, in my new capacity as an expert on this most famous of American family feuds I was invited to speak to a weekly breakfast meeting of the Weirton Rotary Club.
The Rotarians were stunned (well, mildly curious) when I happened to mention that I am related to the feuding Hatfields through my mother's family, the Adkins of Lincoln County, W.Va.
True, the Hatfield connection is not direct from clan leader Devil Anse Hatfield, and it is not by blood, but by marriage: Hester Ann Adkins Hatfield, a sister to my maternal grandfather, Millard Fillmore Adkins (yes, he was named for that president) was the second wife of John Heenan Hatfield (1863-1933).
You may ask why anyone would boast of a family relationship to a murderous clan of dirt-floor-shack hillbillies, but you already know why: the romance of the outlaw, a tale of revenge with a Civil War background, begun over a disputed hog and spiced up with a Romeo and Juliet romance that ends tragically. You've probably seen a movie or two about them.
What red-blooded American male wouldn't brag a little about being related to someone who earned a cool nickname like Devil Anse, riding across state lines with his menfolk armed to the teeth, dispensing hill-country justice when the law couldn't be trusted to do it? Furthermore I bet they did too have wood floors in their two-room shack.
From sometime in my foggy past I remembered hearing about Heenan Hatfield, so when my wife Honey brought home "The Hatfields and The McCoys" (1982, by Otis K. Rice) from her volunteer used bookstore, I wanted to find out the truth of the connection, if there was one.
I will spare you details of my blundering search, other than to say that I never would have found him without the services of my friend Eileen Collins, president and now sole staff member of the Tri-State Genealogical & Historical Society, who located him at www.findagrave.com, with photos and the crucial info that he married Hester Ann Adkins. My Adkins cousin Jane Grass Hart, who is 85 but still a fierce veteran in the genealogy wars, completed the link by pointing me to a photo showing our grandfather Millard with three sisters, one of whom was Hester.
Heenan Hatfield would have been a young man during the 1880s, the bloodiest years of the feud, and the story passed down through my mother Ol' Food was that to keep him from being shot he was sent to Chicago, where he became a cop, and as a big man with Hatfield grit and genes I'm sure he was a good one, if he was one. Like many aspects of the story, some things are hard to document, and I still don't know how closely related Heenan may have been to Devil Anse. For instance, my sister Col. Peggy remembered being told that our grandmother Lelia Jane Adkins Adkins (yes, she was an Adkins who married an Adkins, no relation, as Millard's second wife) as a young girl hid in a hayloft when they heard the McCoys were coming to get them. From that, Peg and I thought our grandmother Lelia was the connection to the Hatfields.
A fair number of Adkins families from Lincoln County came upriver to the East Liverpool area for work in the potteries and later the steel mills. My friend and funeral impresario, the late, great, Frank C. "Digger" Dawson, took so many bodies back to Hamlin at the Koontz Funeral Home that he was practically adopted as a Koontz. I would love to know how many McCoys and Hatfields came up here, too. Perhaps their descendants can claim a relation to Devil Anse, or know more about Heenan.
I was going to tell you how our Adkins line is directly descended from Shawnee Chief Cornstalk through his daughter Blue Sky and her daughter Charity, and that we are also descended from the family of Sir Francis Drake through his brother James or Jimmy Drake, though Wikipedia says he didn't have a brother Jimmy. There was a nephew in North Carolina, though.
Sadly, I'm out of space for today.