My sister and I have grown up going with Mom to libraries and cemeteries in several states, while she built up her family genealogy. In November of 2011, Mom discovered findagrave.com and we decided to stop at a nearby cemetery to take a few photo requests. As we don't have local family, it was really fun to get to be involved in local cemeteries and local history. We soon became findagrave nuts and have spent many hours and days in cemeteries in several counties in Central Ohio. The second cemetery we went to for Find A Grave was an old Baptist church cemetery that is in a state of disrepair. While exploring all the sections, I found a tall, zinc monument to a mother and her two infant children who died. One was a little girl named "Truannie", which intrigued me, and I began actually researching her family and it has proved to be a wealth of local history! In the two years and two months since we began our Find A Grave work, we have had loads of fun and been able to help some other people find their relatives tombstones.
This blog is a place for me to share any bits of information that I find about anybody I happen to be researching. I am not usually content to just add a photo or memorial to Find A Grave and call it done. I like to find out as much information as I can about the person, so that down the road . . . someone might be really excited to find out about a relative they have been searching for! I like to try and find obituaries or death notices about people, so I spend a good amount of time looking through old newspapers. So I type up any relative articles and put them here as well as on Find A Grave. Also, sometimes I find an interesting article while browsing the papers and I just can't resist typing it up.
A lady on rootsweb.com posted over 50 posts of typed up articles which her grandmother had cut out of local papers and pasted in books. I found a bunch of very informative articles about the family I have been researching, and am so grateful that she took the time to share all those articles. So, maybe one day someone will be happy with one of the ones I have transcribed. Sometimes I come across a particular individual who really intrigues me for some reason or other. Since they have more research time in them (and usually a lot more typing!), they get a page of their own. So, click into one of the named tabs at the top of this site and you can discover some of my very interesting historical figures!
". . . the genealogy of all their little ones, their wives, and their sons, and their daughters, through all the congregation . . . " - 2 Chronicles 31:18b
This blog is a place for me to share any bits of information that I find about anybody I happen to be researching. I am not usually content to just add a photo or memorial to Find A Grave and call it done. I like to find out as much information as I can about the person, so that down the road . . . someone might be really excited to find out about a relative they have been searching for! I like to try and find obituaries or death notices about people, so I spend a good amount of time looking through old newspapers. So I type up any relative articles and put them here as well as on Find A Grave. Also, sometimes I find an interesting article while browsing the papers and I just can't resist typing it up.
A lady on rootsweb.com posted over 50 posts of typed up articles which her grandmother had cut out of local papers and pasted in books. I found a bunch of very informative articles about the family I have been researching, and am so grateful that she took the time to share all those articles. So, maybe one day someone will be happy with one of the ones I have transcribed. Sometimes I come across a particular individual who really intrigues me for some reason or other. Since they have more research time in them (and usually a lot more typing!), they get a page of their own. So, click into one of the named tabs at the top of this site and you can discover some of my very interesting historical figures!
". . . the genealogy of all their little ones, their wives, and their sons, and their daughters, through all the congregation . . . " - 2 Chronicles 31:18b
My Mom picked a Bess Streeter Aldrich book of the shelf to try, and by the end of the first few pages, she knew it was going to be a "keeper". Miss Aldrich manages to convey the perfect feeling that we feel every time we start walking through a cemetery. Here is part of the opening from the novel, "Song of Years", written in 1939 and the message is still the same today.
Between the two towns on the north and east side of the curving river is a strip of fertile farming land which was preempted by some of the first settlers in the Valley.
If you follow a paved highway a few miles to the north and west of it, turning at a certain point onto a side road, you will come to a wide iron gate set in a fence surrounding farm fields. Open the gate and follow the grassy trail which hugs the wire fence, and you will arrive in time at a second gate far up the sloping hillside. If it be early summer and the green corn young, you can catch a glimpse of that which lies at the end of the trail. But if the corn is high you must come to the second gate before you can see the tall white tombstones, the close-clipped grass of the plots, and the graveled paths that lie between.
Here rest those first settlers.
It is a place of utter peace. There are times when no sound penetrated but the rustling of the corn of the dropping of a pine-cone. Sometimes, though, one will hear a combine at work near these sleeping men who cut their grain with a cradle, or, perchance, a plane zoom over the heads of these quiet ones who followed the grassy trail with oxen.
But though there is a deep peace about them now, almost can you hear their loud laughter that this is so. They would tell you that peace may be here at the end of the trail, but there was very little at the end of that other one which led westward from Dubuque.
Because they who lie here are all connected by blood or marriage or neighborhood ties, the life of one in its bare outlines is the life of all. But what of those other things – the loving, hating, feuding, fending – all of the emotions that were stilled when the last old settler was brought here? For the life of one can never be the life of all.
The tall old stones with their drooping angel-wings and clasped hands cover long-forgotten interests as intertwined in that period as these vines on the marble shafts – the ashes of emotions as burned out now as the old camp-fires beside the trail. You will note a monuments to Sabina, to Emily, to Celia, one to Melinda, to Phoebe Lou, to Jeanie. Almost at the end of the central path where it curves you will see a shorter heavy stone which reads:
If you follow a paved highway a few miles to the north and west of it, turning at a certain point onto a side road, you will come to a wide iron gate set in a fence surrounding farm fields. Open the gate and follow the grassy trail which hugs the wire fence, and you will arrive in time at a second gate far up the sloping hillside. If it be early summer and the green corn young, you can catch a glimpse of that which lies at the end of the trail. But if the corn is high you must come to the second gate before you can see the tall white tombstones, the close-clipped grass of the plots, and the graveled paths that lie between.
Here rest those first settlers.
It is a place of utter peace. There are times when no sound penetrated but the rustling of the corn of the dropping of a pine-cone. Sometimes, though, one will hear a combine at work near these sleeping men who cut their grain with a cradle, or, perchance, a plane zoom over the heads of these quiet ones who followed the grassy trail with oxen.
But though there is a deep peace about them now, almost can you hear their loud laughter that this is so. They would tell you that peace may be here at the end of the trail, but there was very little at the end of that other one which led westward from Dubuque.
Because they who lie here are all connected by blood or marriage or neighborhood ties, the life of one in its bare outlines is the life of all. But what of those other things – the loving, hating, feuding, fending – all of the emotions that were stilled when the last old settler was brought here? For the life of one can never be the life of all.
The tall old stones with their drooping angel-wings and clasped hands cover long-forgotten interests as intertwined in that period as these vines on the marble shafts – the ashes of emotions as burned out now as the old camp-fires beside the trail. You will note a monuments to Sabina, to Emily, to Celia, one to Melinda, to Phoebe Lou, to Jeanie. Almost at the end of the central path where it curves you will see a shorter heavy stone which reads:
SUZANNE
BELOVED WIFE
OF
BELOVED WIFE
OF
But what else it says you cannot know because a thick growth of old clinging woodbine and a clump of sweet-william cover the secret of whose beloved she was.
Reading the inscription chiseled long ago, it seems of such small consequence whose name is hidden under the vines. But, oh, to Suzanne it mattered so very, very much.
This is the love story of the Suzanne who lies here by the side of the curving graveled path. And because the years of her youth were the years of the settling of the Cedar Valley, the telling must include, perforce, the story of these others who lie beside her at the end of the trail.
Reading the inscription chiseled long ago, it seems of such small consequence whose name is hidden under the vines. But, oh, to Suzanne it mattered so very, very much.
This is the love story of the Suzanne who lies here by the side of the curving graveled path. And because the years of her youth were the years of the settling of the Cedar Valley, the telling must include, perforce, the story of these others who lie beside her at the end of the trail.