Cemetery Follies

Introduction:
Every time I create a blog post over a seemingly off-the-wall topic, I wonder if people who actually read it become concerned about my mental health, as if to say, "Where did that come from?"  So please forgive the long intro into how I came to write this one.

When my sister and I were children, it was not at all unusual for our grandmother to take us to the cemetery for a picnic.  That particular cemetery--Moon Point, near Streator, IL--is in the country, isolated, and therefore quite peaceful and serene.  It wasn't at all unusual to see deer there, and very unusual to see other people.  Many of my grandfather's ancestors are buried there, but I think our grandmother's real attraction to visiting the cemetery was due to a family tragedy.  There was a sister between the eldest grandchild and me who died very tragically in a home accident on our grandparents' watch as a mere toddler.  The newspaper article reported that the grandparents were "prostrate with grief", and I believe that, knowing them.  I think our grandmother could feel Barbara's presence in that old cemetery.  Thus, I grew up thinking of cemeteries as places of comfort; not scary at all.

My daughter is quite the genealogist.  She has records of her ancestors on both sides of her family, but the ones on her father's side seem easier to research because his folks emigrated to Putnam County, Indiana, and stayed there for generations.  (My crew--at least on my father's side--is more scattered.)  In any case, she has recently been focusing on some research after a bit of a break from it all, and since she is in Washington State instead of in Indiana, it gets a little tougher.  She and I both get consumed by it.  Some of the family stories are extremely interesting, which bring questions, which bring a burning desire to know more.  Sometimes, ancestral stories start and/or end in cemeteries.

Just today, I went to the Plainfield (Indiana) Public Library to see if I could dredge up some stuff that would answer some of her questions and a couple of mine.  Does it matter that these aren't MY relatives?  Nope. It's like being a detective trying to solve mysteries.  I love it!  And with all that by way of explanation of the reason for this blog entry, allow me to continue with the meat of my stories.

The Follies:
Memorial Day in Indiana is traditionally Race Day.  All eyes are on the Indy 500.
Memorial Day for the rest of the world is the day that people visit cemeteries to decorate the graves of loved ones who have passed.
On two such Memorial Days, Meg (my daughter), her two very young children (Robin and Ryan), and I set out on cemetery adventures, armed only with information about where some of her ancestors were buried all around Central Indiana, particularly Putnam County close by.  We weren't looking to decorate graves as much as just to find them.  Meg had a list of people she wanted to find in order to complete her records.  She had a route planned that covered at least nine cemeteries to visit each time.  The children were captively along for the ride.  Both excursions were on delightfully warm days.  We made a day of it, supplied with drinks, snacks, diapers, and gas in the car...and off we went early in the day.  The following comprises the interesting things that happened to us in the process of our search, without my remembering what happened on which trip or in any particular order.  You will simply have to forgive that I can't always remember which thing happened in which cemetery.

#1--Greencastle, IN:
One old cemetery is land-locked; that is, no vehicles can go in it, and there is no place to park, publicly.  It no longer takes burials.  It's pretty much in the middle of the DePauw University campus.  Thus, we illegally parked in an apartment parking lot adjacent to the cemetery.  The children were asleep in the back seat, so I stayed with the car while Megan explored.  She finally found who she was looking for, but it wasn't an easy search.

Another old cemetery is huge.  Meg was looking for specific people that she hadn't, so far, been able to locate.  I took one look at the size of the place and quickly realized that we weren't likely to find them that day.  I was driving.  We were looking for Bryan ancestors.  As we drove into the cemetery, I noticed some old-looking gravestones up the hill to the right, so I headed the car in that direction.  Meg wasn't looking where I was looking, so I started reading off names as I saw them.  Meg let out a little shriek.  They were exactly the names she had been searching for!  We had inadvertently driven right straight to their graves!  She was able to check several folks off her list with that one stroke of fate.

#2--Mount Carmel Cemetery, somewhere close to Fillmore, IN:
This particular cemetery is on a hill with no vehicle access.  We had to park on the road that had no shoulder, which I didn't like very much.  As we searched for ancestral tombstones, little Ryan, who was walking around with no knowledge of how to read or understand anything beyond the fact that we were looking for relatives, said, "At least we're not trapped."  Huh?  What did you say, Ry?  "At least we're not trapped."  It took me awhile but it occurred to me that his toddler brain must have thought that the people we were seeking were trapped inside the tombstones with their names on them.  Oh, sweet boy, how smart you were!

#3--Fillmore, IN, where Meg's beloved grandparents are buried:
Fillmore is a very small town, where her McNary grandparents, and others, were born, went to school, and later buried.  There is, basically, one road that goes all the way through town and a few miles from other civilization.  By the time we got to Fillmore, I really had to go to the bathroom.  Had been holding it in for awhile.  Meg was driving, so I instructed her to find a gas station or a convenience store in order to relieve myself.  No such luck.  Fillmore had no public facilities.  Not even a restaurant that we could find.  We were, however, quite close to the cemetery, so I considered our options and decided to continue on.  If I had to "go" in the woods at the back of the cemetery, I would.  We had come this far.  I just didn't want to be a buzzkill.  When we pulled into the cemetery, I noted that there, with an archangel pointing the way, was an outhouse!  A working outhouse that actually had toilet paper in it!  Hallelujah!  Moments later, I was a happier camper and we could proceed with vigor.

As we walked around looking for tombstones with the right names on them, we allowed the children to wander, as long as they were still in sight.  There were no other humans there that day.  While the adults did their thing, Ryan had found a child's grave by the back fence of the cemetery limits.  He knew it was a child's grave because there were toys around it.  From a distance, we could see him on his knees there, talking to...something.  To be honest, it spooked me a bit.  What was he talking to??  He didn't seem to be playing with the toys.  When I got closer and asked, he said he was talking to/playing with something furry.  There were no stuffed animals.  Was he seeing a mouse or a rat?  No...  He wasn't the least bit scared.  He was peaceful.  I'll never know what he was seeing that the rest of us couldn't see, but I will always wonder.  What was he--three years old?

It was also in this cemetery that a butterfly fluttered to Megan.  I can't remember if it actually landed on her or not, but she was in momentary tears, remembering the old adage that butterflies in cemeteries are the spirits of loved ones buried there.  She felt surely this was the spirit of her beloved grandmother welcoming her.  She was touched, and so was I.

#4--New Providence:
Believe it or not, this cemetery had a little playground area at the entrance.  We allowed the children to go play while we did our tombstone search so they could run off some pent-up energy.  Robin was wearing a brand new little sundress-type thing.  When we called the children back to the car in order to leave, the front of her dress was a gooey mess.  She simply didn't know how the dress got messed up.  I asked her if she'd thrown up.  She said yes..so I was worried about her.  Maybe too much excitement and not enough real-food meals today?  But she sure didn't seem sick.  MUCH later, her brother tattled that she had broken a robin's egg that she'd found--all over her frock.  That very same dress on that very same day got a tear in the back from our breaching a different cemetery's barbed-wire fence.  Bye-bye dress.  And it was cute, too...

#5--Sunshine Praise Point:
Somewhere between Belle Union and where my in-law's lived off of US 40, there was a road going off to the south that supposedly had a cemetery we wanted to visit.  I turned off on the one that I thought was the road that would take us there.  I was wrong.  As we soon discovered, the road gave way to a car "path" of sorts.  It was a dirt-rutty mess with a stream going over it, and totally uphill and in the woods.  I figured that I needed to turn around and get out of there, but there was no way to do that.  We had no choice but to continue to bounce and jostle and bump our way up the hill, hoping that the car would make it to the top and that it actually went somewhere.

We finally crested the hill into a clearing that consisted of, maybe, six lovely houses.  The residents had named the site Sunshine Praise Point.  In essence, it was a gathering of like-minded Christians who built houses there and had their own little utopia.  When we got into the settlement, we spied a young man walking through a yard.  We hailed him and asked about egress.  "How do we get out of here?"  It was obvious by his reaction that he had answered this question before.  He grinned and told us that the only way out was the same way we came in.  Yikes!  We had no choice but to turn around and head back down the Death Road.

I've thought about that place so many times in the years since.  The resale value of those homes can only be assessed by the fact that there is no navigable road in or out.  How do they do it?  Especially in winter?  It's insane!  I guess it works for them.  I would love to go back to see how the place is now but don't particularly care to subject my vehicle to the beating from the road!  And I've always wondered what the young man told the others after encountering us.  Perhaps: "Yee haw!  Another car full of greenhorn tourists just got caught by our hill!"

#6--The SR 231 Invisible Cemetery:
One cemetery that we sought was supposedly at the intersection of SR 231 north of Greencastle, and SR 36, way west of Danville.  Easy-peasy, right?  No...it was nowhere to be found.  We drove way north of the intersection and way south of the intersection but never found a cemetery.  We saw a buffalo farm and a number of businesses, but no cemetery.  The problem was that we were looking for something that actually looked like a cemetery.  And then, somehow, Megan noticed something, so we turned into a sales lot for Detro trailers and golf carts, etc., at that intersection.  There, in the back portion of their sales lot, on a hill with a gravel roadway, were two separate burial grounds.  Not cemeteries but places of burial.  One lot was for Meg's Farrow ancestors--quite a few of them.  The names at the other site were Dardons, or something like that.

I gasped.  Alexander Farrow and his family that were buried in that space--some of them infants--were early settlers in Indiana.  The man, himself, was actually a member of the Constitutional Convention that founded Indiana's state government.  He had donated that part of his land to be a burial place for his family and others.  And then, somehow, through the years, the land was sold and sold again, leaving the burial site almost an island in a sea of gravel roadways taking sales reps and customers to look at goods for sale.  We had to tell the folks in the office why we were there so they wouldn't think we were trespassing.  I hated that.

Were I a person of means, I would have done anything I could to move Mr. Farrow and his family in a place of reverence rather than on a trailer sales lot.  And he's not even my ancestor!  Maybe I'm being sentimental and stupid, but it occurs to me that people deserve to be remembered, which is why we have cemeteries and gravestones to begin with.

#7--Deer Creek Primitive Baptist Church:
Most of the cemeteries we visited on these Memorial Day treks are in isolated areas away from civilization.  Sometimes just locating them can be an exercise in patience and eagle-eyed observation and assumption.  One such cemetery was on the grounds of a Primitive Baptist Church.  Seriously, I don't know if "primitive" was a description of the denomination or of the location and grounds.  The church building was a small, white wooden structure at the base of a little hill.  I'm not sure if it was still a functioning church.  I can't remember if it was boarded up or not, but there were outhouses in the back, a tell-tale sign that the place certainly was primitive and probably no longer in use.  It was toward the end of our day of adventure.  We were tired, and so were the children.  Meg had an ancestor buried there, actually the earliest Putnam County burial in 1839.  If we were lucky, we would find the tombstone, and if we were luckier, the engraving on it would still be legible.  (Often, they weren't.)  This was a small, shady cemetery, so, maybe....?

We never really made much of an effort to look.  Why?  Bugs.  Lots and lots of bugs.  Biting bugs.  Whole swarms of flying, biting bugs.  Apparently the bugs found us to be fresh meat because they would not leave us alone.  Meg found the stone she was looking for fairly quickly, and since we were swatting more than we were looking, we quickly abandoned the place for the safety of the car and headed for home, never to return.  I couldn't find that cemetery again if I wanted to!   

Conclusion:
I wouldn't trade these experiences for the world.  I'm not sure how the experiences translated in my grandchildren's minds, however.  Once, after one of the trips, my granddaughter announced to a friend, "Guess what?  We are going to visit relatives today, and they're alive!"

Out of the mouths of babes...