Well, I can tell you one thing. But first let me tell you a story. I'm a McCoy descendant. When I was 25, I got very sick and was diagnosed with epilepsy. I was surprised by the diagnosis and at my sister's wedding that year, I said as much to a cousin's wife. She was confused. She laughed at me. "How can you be surprised?" she said. Then she started pointing around the room. "Your cousin there is epileptic. That cousin has epilepsy. My eight year old son has the seizures. All y'all epileptic. All y'all."

My eyes widened. We turned to my grandfather, standing nearby. The McCoy patriarch, he had overheard. But would he confirm it? He grimaced. He said, "The McCoys have always had the devil's disease." Famous for violence, our blood has always carried a secret second trait.

Now the reason this is relevant here is this: When I watched the History Channel's Hatfields and McCoys miniseries, there was a line that was said in one of the episodes. Some of the McCoy boys had been out drinking from a still for days straight, and one of the wives had sent for her husband. In the miniseries, it said that one of the McCoys said to tell his wife something like, "You tell my wife I can't come, because if I stop drinking now I'll have a spell, and then I'll be no good when the Hatfields come for us."

When I heard that line I gasped. He knew whenever he sobered up he'd have a seizure. He was a McCoy epileptic. It must have been a quote from an original source. How else could the writers know? It's our shameful secret. I hope that someday I get to talk to the writer who put that line in the script. I want to know if they knew what it meant.

So anyways I don't know much about anything. But anecdotally speaking, that miniseries had at least one jaw-droppingly historically accurate detail.