Over my spring break from UNC Wilmington, I travelled to Bryson City for a third time, to gather materials for my film, "Lost Souls of Lauada."  On Friday, March 8, I visited the Swain County Genealogical & Historical Society.  I was met there by Christine Proctor, Lawrence Hyatt and Brian Aldrich.  Mr. Hyatt is almost 80 years old, and was born in the area now referred to as the North Shore.  He and his wife were on their way from their home in Tennessee to a funeral in Sylva, and graciously agreed to stop in Bryson City to let me interview him.  We first interviewed Brian Aldrich at the North Shore Cemetery Association's annual reunion last October.  He was kind enough to come in this day to let me conduct an audio interview in order to add some new information we didn't get during our initial interview.  Thanks to Christine for arranging these interviews.

While at the Genealogical & Historical Society, I accessed the "TVA North Shore Cemetery Removal" archive.  I scanned and made copies of the cemetery maps that the TVA created when relocating the over one thousand graves from areas that would be underwater when the valley was flooded during the Second World War, creating Fontana Lake.  I will use these maps in my film.

I spoke with Swain County Commissioner David Monteith, whose family came from the North Shore.  He gave me a DVD copy of a film he made, "'The North Shore Story," and gave me permission to use any of the old photographs of the North Shore contained on the DVD, as well as permission to use anything of value that I may find on the swaincountync.gov website.  David is a gold mine of information on the North Shore.

I also got some good shots of the "Road to Nowhere" tunnel entrance, to complement the footage we shot last October from inside the tunnel (it was raining that day, so we couldn't shoot the outside of the tunnel).

As the ground was wet from a snowstorm earlier in the week, a handful of members of the Lauada Cemetery Association that had planned to meet at the cemetery on Saturday to work, cancelled their work day, thus ending my plans to shoot there that day.  And in an ironic twist, the Bojangles in Bryson City. where the Lauada Cemetery Association holds their meetings, and where I had hoped to film an impromptu get together, had just recently been torn down!  A new Bojangles is supposed to take the place of the old one.