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Dec. 25th, 2003 01:37 amYesterday, my parents, my brother, and I all went to see where my mom and great aunts had scattered my grandmother's ashes in May. (Bit of history: my grandmother was killed in a car accident in October, 2002, at age 83. She was cremated.) She had asked that her ashes be scattered on the family farm -- I had no idea that my mom's family had even had a farm, let alone still owned it. It turns out that one of my great aunts bought out the shares of all her siblings, and owns it outright. She doesn't use it as a farm, so it's all overgrown, though it's clearly newly overgrown: the trees are still relatively small.
Driving around in that part of Michigan also put us squarely in the area where my mom grew up. We looked around at various houses, some still owned & occupied by various great-aunts & great-uncles, as well as some new houses that Mom kept pointing out while saying "and that's where the barn used to be, and...". We stopped by the church she went to while growing up, as well as the cemetery where a number of her great aunts, great uncles, cousins (etc) were buried.
She'd also found diaries from one of her great great grandfathers (or maybe only one great, I'm not sure), who was an itinerant preacher, and from the diaries she had figured out the location of an abandoned cemetery that likely contained a number of her ancestors. We went there, to find that someone was still maintaining the cemetery! Many of the gravestones were so worn as to be illegible, but a some bore names of people that Mom was fairly certain were her (and therefore my) relatives. A few had fought in the Civil War.
Seeing all this family history out in the middle of Michigan farmland was... odd. I'm not entirely sure how to react to this -- it was simultaneously fascinating and morbid. I'm also not sure I've entirely digested the entire trip yet, even though I've had a day or so to think on it.
Driving around in that part of Michigan also put us squarely in the area where my mom grew up. We looked around at various houses, some still owned & occupied by various great-aunts & great-uncles, as well as some new houses that Mom kept pointing out while saying "and that's where the barn used to be, and...". We stopped by the church she went to while growing up, as well as the cemetery where a number of her great aunts, great uncles, cousins (etc) were buried.
She'd also found diaries from one of her great great grandfathers (or maybe only one great, I'm not sure), who was an itinerant preacher, and from the diaries she had figured out the location of an abandoned cemetery that likely contained a number of her ancestors. We went there, to find that someone was still maintaining the cemetery! Many of the gravestones were so worn as to be illegible, but a some bore names of people that Mom was fairly certain were her (and therefore my) relatives. A few had fought in the Civil War.
Seeing all this family history out in the middle of Michigan farmland was... odd. I'm not entirely sure how to react to this -- it was simultaneously fascinating and morbid. I'm also not sure I've entirely digested the entire trip yet, even though I've had a day or so to think on it.
