The Crabpot

This is only partly about genealogy research. Three or four years ago I came across some Harvey family members from Carteret County North Carolina. They saw something I wrote about my Foreman family and wanted to know if their Foreman ancestor was related.

It turned out that their great great grandmother, Cornelia Foreman Harvey was the sister of my great great grandmother Hope Jane Foreman. We exchanged several emails and they had some old photos they sent me which I appreciated.

Then this past December I saw a newspaper article about Neal Harvey of Davis, North Carolina and the Core Sound Christmas Trees he was making out of Crabpots. In Florida we call them Crab Traps, but folks in Eastern North Carolina have their own dialect, so they call them Crabpots. A cousin in Cortez, Florida stores a bunch of them next to my mother's house and she has never had very merry thoughts about them, but Neal Harvey got the idea he could brighten up Christmas with them.

Neal has made and sold Crabpots for years and since the fishing business hasn't been too good in recent years decided to use the material and shape a tree out of it. The result is a perfect Christmas tree that can stand up to just about anything mother nature can throw at it. Crab traps have to be strong, since they stay in the water for months at a time and if they develop a hole the fisherman's catch doesn't make it to market.

We bought a 6 foot Core Sound Christmas tree this year and proudly put it in our front yard. Our kids and neighbors will tell you our annual decorations are pretty lame but this year we started a new trend.