What do you mean I had an accent?!

Most of my family lives up North in Vermont and Indiana.  When I went up there to visit as a kid, I took my apparent accent with me.  My cousins had never heard the words "yall", "Ain't", or any sort of true southern accent.  They made fun of me for it for a long time, but when they came to visit us one summer, I noticed my cousin Elliot say "are yall ready to go yet."  I asked him why he was saying yall now and he told me that when I came to visit them, they had never heard someone speak as I had and they took on some of the words I brought with me to Indiana as part of their vocabulary.  I was born in very small town in North Carolina called Locust. Locust, a town so small that you could walk anywhere in the town in under thirty minutes, was very southern. I lived there until I was almost six and then moved closer to the city of Charlotte.  When I was sixteen, I sat down and watched some of our home videos of my family when I was very young.  I noticed that I had a very deep country accent.  My Mom called me her country bumpkin.  My voice had a southern twang that, when I was sixteen, I had already grown out of.  I realized that since I moved closer to a region that did not have as many people from the south, I lost my accent.  I felt disheartened about this because I felt that a part of my heritage had been lost when I lost my original accent.  Of course I am happy now that I don't have the accent because in my mind the accent mad me seem unintelligent.  But I wasn't the only one that lost their accent in the move.  My Mom, born and raised in the south, lost her accent as well.  However, sometimes when I hear her talk on the phone to other southern people, I can hear her accent come out like osmosis through the telephone.  I would consider myself to have had a very deep southern accent when I was young, but now I believe my voice is distinguished and I am happier with it.  Although, I bet if someone from another region of the country heard me speak, they might think otherwise.