Gardens of Stone, Indeed!

Phase Three of my Great Ancestry Project involves some legwork. Since I have about exhausted my initial supply of old family photos and have uploaded them onto my Ancestry.com family tree, it is time to go cemetery-hopping. I used to think this was the dumbest thing ever. Why would anyone want to wander around looking at boring old tombstones? I can remember Grandma Margaret and her sister Dolly taking my brother and me out on these "adventures" when we were too young to protest. Aunt Doll would pack a basket with bottles of Fresca and Tab and some cream cheese sandwiches and off we'd go. We would picnic atop the family slabs.

I don't pack picnics and have only been to one cemetery so far, but it is no coincidence that I started with the very one we used to visit with Margaret and Doll. St. John's Cemetery is part of St. John's Freewill Baptist Church and is located within a couple of miles of Interstate 10 in Bonifay, Florida. My grandmother's mother, Jennie Anderson Perdue is buried there as well as a few of her children and a sibling or two along with a heaping helping of cousins. I had to refer to my mobile version of my family tree to keep all the last names straight.

Up to this point I have gotten to know my family as faces and names on a two-dimensional family tree application. I can see them in my mind as they relate to me and each other on limbs of the tree. I made two trips to the cemetery this month. The first time I was on my way to take my daughter to camp and had a short time to acquaint myself with the locations of people I was certain of and photograph their headstones. Afterwords, I went back to the family tree to reference other stones with familiar names. Bringing my daughter back from camp, I returned to the cemetery and easily located those relatives. I have learned that vital records are great sources of information, but tombstones are even greater for validations of those. Census takers have often misspelled names in their records and so it is nice to see them as they were chiseled into stones. I am frequently humbled by the rampant illiteracy of the olden days.

While identifying photos with my mother describing people and places and events, I got a feel for the personalities of quite a few ancestors. When I returned to St. John's the last time, I got a sense that they were hanging around. Not in a haunting way, rather they were now in familial clusters including some folks I knew a little more about. My direct ancestors Jennie and Margaret were over there with Ellafere and Devader and Agnes, while on the other side there were the Weeks' bunch that Artemus married into and beyond that were some Yates' who were Martha's in-laws. The place felt so much more three-dimensional and relevant. I almost wished I'd packed a picnic.