Genealogy & Local History

The Langfords of Rockcastle County tells the fascinating story of one family’s struggle to survive in the American Backcountry. Tracing the history of the Langford family over multiple generations, from 17th century Jamestown to 20th century Kentucky, their story cuts like a cross-section through American history. 

From Tidewater Virginia to the backcountry of eastern Kentucky, the Langfords had family members embroiled in some of the most pivotal events of American history. In the decades that followed the Civil War the Langfords became embroiled in several protracted blood-feuds. Inter-clan violence engulfed three-generations as they fought to survive amongst the rugged hills of Rockcastle County. 

The duration of the feuding and the violence that transpired far surpassed that of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud by some margin. This book attempts to explore the reasons behind the violence and make sense of one of Kentucky’s least understood feuding families. 

This case study will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and social scientists alike.

While the century began with such promise, it is 1910 when Mira Dean's hopes of being a wife and mother are dashed to pieces. Her fiancé dead from tuberculosis, Mira resigns herself to being a spinster schoolteacher--until Gordon Covington shows up.

No longer the boy she knew from school, Gordon is now a preacher who is full of surprises. First, he asks Mira to come to Sourwood in eastern Kentucky to teach at his mission school. Second, he asks her to marry him. Just like that. And all at once the doors that had seemed firmly shut begin to open, just a crack.

With much trepidation, Mira steps out in faith into a life she never imagined, in a place filled with its own special challenges, to serve a people who will end up becoming the family she always dreamed of.

From the pen of bestselling author Ann H. Gabhart comes a heartwarming story of the unexpected blessings that can come when we dare to follow the Lord's leading.

Follow Randy Mink in this autobiographical anthology as he takes readers through four different periods of his life. His tear-jerking book, "Front Porches to the Picture Window," features heartfelt stories written in his Hemingway style, writing the simplest and truest sentences he knows. Those tears of sorrow will change to tears of laughter with later humorous stories written in a style that has been compared to Lewis Grizzard. 
Randy takes readers from his youth to his later years filled with darkness, depression, and suicidal thoughts as he pursues his dream of becoming a writer. He bears his soul for all to see during his misdiagnosis of Early Onset Alzheimer's and a massive heart attack, where he was clinically dead and visited heaven, only to be sent back to finish his work as a writer. He does all this through faith, persistence, and never giving up on his dream of writing; all while being the caregiver to his mother, who also has Alzheimer's. After his mother's death, he retired from his job of thirty-eight years to return to the front porches of his Appalachian roots to finish all the books he had been writing throughout his life, now as an old man himself. 
Randy returns to the home of his youth set for demolition. As an old man, he gives words of wisdom to the young boy he once was, teaching him to never give up on his callings and gifts. As they stand together looking out the picture window where he stood years before, he finds the innocence of his youth again. This is a story of faith, hope, and love from which all readers can relate and draw encouragement for their own struggles and dreams.

Part I. Considering Hillbilly Elegy. Interrogating. Hillbilly elitism / T.R.C. Hutton -- Social capital / Jeff Mann -- Once upon a time in "Trumpalachia": Hillbilly Elegy, personal choice, and the blame game / Dwight B. Billings -- Stereotypes on the syllabus: exploring Hillbilly Elegy's use as an instructional text at colleges and universities / Elizabeth Catte -- Benham, Kentucky, coal miner / Wise County, Virginia, landscape / Theresa Burriss -- Panning for gold: A reflection of life from Appalachia / Ricardo Nazario y Colón -- Will the real hillbilly please stand up? Urban Appalachian migration and culture seen through the lens of Hillbilly Elegy / Roger Guy -- What Hillbilly Elegy reveals about race in twenty-first-century America / Lisa R. Pruitt -- Prisons are not innovation / Lou Murrey -- Down and out in Middletown and Jackson: drugs, dependency, and decline in J.D. Vance's Capitalist Realism / Travis Linnemann and Corina Medley. Responding. Keep your "elegy": the Appalachia I know is very much alive / Ivy Brashear -- HE said/SHE said / Crystal Good -- The hillbilly miracle and the fall / Michael E. Maloney -- Elegies / Dana Wildsmith -- In defense of J.D. Vance / Kelli Hansel Haywood -- It's crazy around here, I don't know what to do about It, and I'm just a kid / Allen Johnson -- "Falling in love," Balsam Bald, the Blue Ridge Parkway, 1982 / Danielle Dulken -- Black hillbillies have no time for elegies / William H. TurnerPart II. Beyond Hillbilly Elegy. Nothing familiar / Jesse Graves -- History / Jesse Graves -- Tether and plow / Jesse Graves -- On and on: Appalachian accent and academic power / Meredith McCarroll -- Olivia's ninth birthday party / Rebecca Kiger -- Kentucky, coming and going / Kirstin L. Squint -- Resistance, or our most worthy habits / Richard Hague -- Notes on a mountain man / Jeremy B. Jones -- These stories sustain me: the wyrd-ness of my Appalachia / Edward Karshner -- Watch children / Luke Travis -- The mower-1933 / Robert Morgan -- Consolidate and salvage / Chelsea Jack -- How Appalachian I am / Robert Gipe -- Aunt Rita along the King Coal Highway, Mingo County, West Virginia / Roger May -- Holler / Keith S. Wilson -- Loving to fool with things / Rachel Wise -- Antebellum cookbook / Kelly Norman Ellis -- How to make cornbread, or thoughts on being an Appalachian from Pennsylvania who calls Virginia home but now lives in Georgia / Jim Minick -- Tonglen for my Mother / Linda Parsons -- Olivia at the intersection / Meg Wilson -- Appalachian apophenia, or the psychogeography of home / Jodie Childers -- Canary dirge / Dale Marie Prenatt -- Poet, priest, and "poor white trash" / Elizabeth Hadaway

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, NAMED BY THE TIMES AS ONE OF "6 BOOKS TO HELP UNDERSTAND TRUMP'S WIN" AND SOON TO BE A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD

"You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist

"A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal

"Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.

But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.