Missouri 26

Listen to Missouri 26, a 76-year-old woman from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 76

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 26/12/1945

PLACE OF BIRTH: Cape Girardeau, Missouri

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: White

OCCUPATION: retired schoolteacher

EDUCATION: master’s degree

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject was born, raised, and lived in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, all her life.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

She grew up and lives in a rural area. She is very active in political debates in her hometown, actively follows the news, and is interested in learning historical facts.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Roxanne Wellington

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 10/08/2022

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I love researching genealogy. I’m convinced that every family is interesting if people will go back into their background. I started being interested in this when I was a teenager, but then I had to stop because I put myself through school, and then I taught for forty-something years. So now I’m back on it.

My family on my father’s side went from Ireland into Scotland. And when they came to the United States, they went through Philadelphia. Many immigrants went there because the Quakers were very open to all kinds of religion, because they thought everybody had this inner light, and there was a lot of respect for people.

Then they went on down to North Carolina. My great-great-great-grandfather was married to a Cherokee Indian. In time, my family came to, uh, Missouri; they came on a flat boat, and, uh, and by the way, my great-great-grandmother was the Cherokee Indian — was named Mary Rainbow. But they came on a flat boat, and they came down the Mississippi River, and they went into there, um, went into Pocahontas, and the church there was one of the first churches west of the Mississippi; and if you go up there, in their books, it tells about them, and my family were some of the founders of it. They have a service once a year, still in the old church; there’s a tin roof there; there’s an old heatin’ stove, and along the front of the wall, these pictures of these old Presbyterian ministers that have long beards [laughs], and, you know, you look at that, and I like to go up there, the third Sunday in May and do that.

In the cemetery are many of my relatives, and one of them is, uh, was in the Revolutionary War, and he fought in King’s Mountain, and, in the war, and he is buried there, as well as other people. Well, my great-great-grandfather whose, who was a member there, his wife died after childbirth, and, well, at least the children were young, so somehow he connected with a lady who went to the Methodist church, so he went to the old McKendree church; he was a farmer, and, not only was he a farmer, he was a stonemason. These people were all Scotch Irish. And by the way, you don’t say scotch. Scotch is the drink; Scot is the nationality, and I learned that [laughs], and I did not know that.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Roxanne Wellington

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/03/2023

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

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• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

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