Kentucky

With your kind permission, I would like to share a little about my history and family. This is just a rough draft of a longer and more detailed essay I would like to write. Depending on the response to this brief beginning, I will post more here.

I was born is South Eastern Kentucky, in the heart of the Appalachian mountains. At birth, mother left me there with her grandparents to raise and take care of me while she pursued a cosmopolitan life up north and until I started school. Afterwards, I spent every summer and holiday back in those glorious, mysterious and beautiful mountains with my beloved great grandparents.
I was always told my family came there with Daniel Boon who dropped them off in the Cumberland Gap and they ventured on south to the edge of Southern Kentucky, where the settled and lived nicely by hunting, farming and trading with the Cherokee.
At some point, my great grandmother's grandfather married a Cherokee, before the Trail of Tears, which Andrew Jackson forced upon the natives.
This is the source of the drop of native american blood I hold with respect and honor.
This part of America has always been isolated and forgotten by mainstream American culture and development. Consequently, the people the,re developed their own uniqe culture, based partially on their Scottish roots and practices and the early settlers from Daniel Boone's time.
To this day you can still see it in the music, food and accents. Being isolated, tucked into in those oddly soft but harsh mountains, the people mostly had to fend for themselves in any way possible. Creating an amazing culture, unlike any other in the United States.
I like to separate the cultural development into pre and post industrial coal mining. I grew up there with my family who lived a mostly pre coal bias. Non of whom worked in the mines and survived as carpenters, farmers. shopkeepers, sheriffs and moonshiners.  
I knew the last of this part of my family.
Today all of that has gone. Hole mountain tops have been shaved off and dumped into the hundreds of pristine streams and rivers that flowed thorough every holler and valley and fed that beautiful land. I grew up in a place called Wallens Creek.
My great grandfather, who I found out many years later, fought in WW1, supported the family as a carpenter, farmer and small engine repair. He, and my great grandmother, along with most of the rest of my family maintained the pre coal values and traditions, which they passed on to me, along with the deep respect and reverence of the mountains the land and bounty the provided.
When my mother came and got me took me north, I then became immersed with northern and mainstream American culture and values, mitigated by my mother's cosmopolitan, liberal and international views of the world.
This odd blending of the two cultures oversaw my development of who I am today. Of which I am very proud and lucky to have experienced.