Tenacity, thy name is Vicki! If I were to devise a coat of arms for my daughter, it would consist of an inquiring eye examining some musty, dusty, antique tome of old deeds or other genealogical esoterica and have a tilting tombstone for its background.
Nothing stops a genealogical sleuth who’s hot on the trail! When we returned to the cemetery on the Old Home Place, she took a saw and cut down a small tree so that she could better see an inscription. I said, “They might object to your cutting down a tree!” She replied, “I have every right to tend my family’s graves.”
I suggested postponing another visit because rain was forecast. “Come hell or high water, we’re going back to Clinton Co. tomorrow!” Intrepid adventurers, we set out under a cloudy sky and drove along gravel roads in search of one of the many old country cemeteries that were established on farms during the 1800’s. Unable to find it, we knocked on the door of a rundown farmhouse. A hippy-looking guy with wild, fly-away hair who was as disheveled as his ramshackle house gave us directions.
“Eek!” I thought. “Here’s a scenario for Alfred Hitchcock!” Picture this: The day is dark and gloomy, and the sky presages rain. Two women stop at a rundown farmhouse miles from anywhere and get directions to an old, abandoned cemetery from a shabby man . . .
We drove along a rutted lane under an archway formed by walnut trees and come to a clearing in the woods where ancient tombstones tilt and crumble. Only the occasional squawk of a jay, the moan of the wind in the trees or the thud of a falling walnut interrupts the ominous silence. The sky is darkening . . .
Me and my imagination! Actually, the man was most courteous and well-spoken in spite of his rough appearance and told how he had played there when he was a boy. “Unfortunately, the acid rain these days is causing the marble stones to deteriorate rapidly,” he said.
We hit genealogical gold when we found a large monument for one of my relatives that proclaimed that he was a veteran of the American Revolution and served in the Shenandoah regiment. “Wow!” I said. “Do you suppose he might even have known George Washington or Thomas Jefferson?”
Vicki clicked busily away with her camera and used aluminum foil to get an impression of the stone as it was too damp to do rubbings on paper. She said, “Let’s come back on a nice day and make rubbings.”
My Indiana roots run deep: My Kelly forebears came to Indiana by oxcart, cleared the land and built homes. I think about the lives of my ancestresses. An old census tract said that one of the Kelly women bore fourteen children. “Goodness!” I said. “Yeah, but a lot of their babies died,” Vicki responded.
Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in Christian love;
The fellowship of kindred minds
Is like to that above.
— Old hymn
My cousin, Wayne Kelly, is three years older than I. Vicki, Tom, Bill and I took him to the cemetery at the Old Home Place when he was in Indiana last June, and we toasted our ancestors with champagne. Wayne, Vicki and I are kindred spirits and feel the same tug of the history of our people. Wayne wrote,
It was an eerie feeling walking over the graves and studying the headstones of ancestors I had never met, yet because of them I was there that day to pay homage to my long-ago family. What would they have thought of this old man from the 21st century? Our lives are so different, and though we never met we are so intertwined in the cosmos of time and space. I felt a bond, a kinship with the remains of those people. wclarke@comcast.net