Tending graves and memories

Hi neighbors. Today is the big holiday! I hope you are all surrounded by friends and family sharing old memories and making new ones.

Bill and I made a trip to Stockton Thursday to place flowers and flags on the graves there. The old church and cemetery of Alder was the stomping grounds of my father's family for three generations.

I told him of how the family used to gather at my grandmother's house and go to decorate graves. As the oldest, and the slowest, "Granny" would walk and tell us her memories of the people buried there.

We children would be reprimanded for running or being too loud, so we usually just trailed Granny around listening to her tales of the old days. Granny was always careful not to call them "the good old days" and she told us why.

People didn't have a lot of "things" in Granny's youth. But they didn't need a lot of things. They did need certain work tools for their trade. My father's family were all farmers, most of them from Virginia and Tennessee on his father's side.

Granny's people all came from Indiana and Illinois where the patriarchs had land granted to them after the War of 1812. For some reason a large group of them decided to all move to Missouri. Sophie Alice kept a journal of the trip.

"Some of the family decided to move to Missouri where Allen's sister had been living for some time. Finally l4, of us set out for Missouri on Sept. 16, 1879. They were: my mother; Flora, Jane, Jim, Dave, Eva, Dot (Minnie), Bert and George; me and Allen and our two children; and Lou. We traveled by two teams, two wagons and two saddle horses and arrived at Aunt Sallie's on a Friday and remained there until the following Monday. Alice's brother, John joined them here for he had been working for his uncle, Jake, at Centralia, IL. He had a team and wagon also.

"The weather was good for most of the trip and we traveled via New Haven, Flora, Salem and Centralia, IL. We also stopped at Buffalo, Mo. and camped one night on the Big Piney and Little Piney Rivers. We finally arrived and settled at Plum Grove, Mo., near Dunnegan, on Oct.13,1879. Allen and I lived with my father and farmed with him for the first five or six years until he sold his farm. We then moved to our own farm on March 1, 1880 and built a home on the prairie in the fall of 1880. Jim and Lou went on to Kansas."

It was a real treasure to find her journal. Sophie was my Granny's great aunt.

As I remember it, Granny knew something about almost everyone in that graveyard at Alder. The family land joined it to the south and the north.

Thursday I took Granny's "job" of passing on some of the family lore to my son. Having studied some of the oldest generation through genealogy, this year I had some new tales to tell him about some of the stones and the people named on them.

Jacob, or Jake, was just a young boy during the Civil War and had to stay home while his older brother was off to the war. He helped two widows bury their Union husbands who had came home on leave and met up with a Confederate cavalry unit on the road. Warned that he'd best "keep his self out of the army's business and stick with being a boy before he got into trouble" by the solders, he continued helping the widows put their husband's bodies on his saddle horse. He replied, "I may be a boy, but I've worn a man's shoes for some time now and I'll do what needs doing." He helped the women bury their husbands right there at Alder Cemetery next to his own kin. The Civil War was fought by many who never wore uniforms either blue or gray, including young boys and widows.

Jake's grandfather, my gr-gr-grandfather, fought in the Mexican War. I just recently found that out. So I put a flag on his grave this year.

It seems odd to me that the knowledge of a family's history can be so lost in one generation. Granny never spoke of the two white markers next to her husband's grandparents stone. Her husband's father spent most of his life in Polk County and obviously never passed on information about his own grandparents.

Until the next time friends remember; Memorial Day is a time to honor our fallen veterans and family members who have passed on. Take some time as you go from grave to grave, to tell your children about the people whose names are on the markers.