Posts Tagged ‘cemeteries’

posted by on At First Glance, Essays About Ancestral Things

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Like most people who love family history, I love to visit cemeteries.  No where else can you stand in one place and have so many stories swirl around you.  I am drawn to the very old grave markers and the rows and rows of people who all died in the same year . . . […]

posted by on Stories Within Stories

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Lydia is such a pretty name.  In fact we have a granddaughter named Lydia.  The same age as Lydia Viola was when she died of cholera at the age of four.  Lydia was the oldest child of Jerome Timothy and Mary June Reynolds Watrous.  She was born in the tiny farming community of Terre Haute […]

posted by on At First Glance, Keepsake Photographs

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We took trimmers and brooms and cans for water.  We cut flowers from the garden.  We explained why we were here and what we were going to do.  When we finished trimming and sweeping our ancestral graves, the grandchildren began to roam around.  They found other grave stones to clean.  Some had dirt.  Some cobwebs.  […]

Papa is Buried Here

Sep
2010
06

posted by on At First Glance, Keepsake Photographs

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To the young child, just learning to read, the cemetery can be an interesting place.  Aside from all of the unusual surnames, there are some words which are repeated over and over in a cemetery.  They are mother, father, papa, mama, brother, sister, daughter, friend, wife, husband.  Coming face-to-face with a stone with papa carved […]

posted by on At First Glance, Keepsake Photographs

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Cemeteries are strange places.  Adults understand cemeteries but children are wary.  On this Memorial Day we took Talmage and Holden with us to meet their ancestors.  Well, at least to see their ancestors’ burial places.  Walking through cemeteries gives grown-ups a chance to talk about things.  About life and death.  About beliefs.  About why we […]

posted by on Ancestors of Thomas Watrous, Stories Within Stories

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This is the entrance to the Pleasant Green Cemetery on top of a hill in what is today Magna, Salt Lake County, Utah.  This cemetery was an early Utah cemetery and is relatively small and modest.  It sits on a hill out of view from the roads below.  Today, the property which surrounds it is […]

posted by on Keepsake Photographs

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Caroline Penn was the first wife of Henry Maiben.   She heard the message of the missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints and was baptized in her native England.  Caroline was a dressmaker.  In 1845 she married direct ancestor Henry Maiben.   They emigrated from England to America and made the trek west in […]

posted by on Ancestors of Thomas Watrous

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This is Mohawk Village in Coshocton County, Ohio as of 2005.  It is in this place that we find the site of the original Mohawk Methodist Church and its churchyard burial ground.  This cemetery is the final resting place of direct ancestor William Pancake, his wife Mary Crawford and several of their descendants.

posted by on Ancestors of Thomas Watrous, Stories Within Stories

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William Pancake was born near Harrisburg in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania to Johann George Pfannekuchen and his wife Anna.  He was the oldest of seven children born to his parents. His father changed his name to George Pancake  and went by that surname from the late 1700s forward.  Direct ancestor William was always known by the […]

posted by on Ancestors of Thomas Watrous, Stories Within Stories

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It was the obituary for our ancestor William Pancake in 1867 that told us where he was buried.  The first Methodist Church in Jefferson Township was built on this spot in Warsaw, Ohio. Our ancestors were among the founding members of the church.  Soon, a graveyard was plotted and grew up around the church.  By […]