A beautiful day

We had a great side trip to Indiana, and I did manage to find all the headstones on my list.

Some were very hard to read, erosion having taken it's toll.

The two smaller tilted headstones above belong to a set of ggg-grandparents who died in the 1860's/1870's.

The headstones on the left, for a different set of ggg-grandparents who died in the 1870's/1880's, were easier to read but were broken into pieces.

Fortunately, in the 1950's some ladies from a DAR chapter made the effort to transcribe all these headstone inscriptions and record them in a book, which I found on the web a few years ago. I'll have to rely on the DAR's interpretation for a few of these!

I'm so glad that I had the chance to visit this area to see where my ancestors actually lived and worked. It truly gave me a whole different perspective on their lives.

Looking at the dark sepia photographs, I imagined that their environment was dreary and dark. In reality, however, the sun was shining and the sky was blue, with a gentle breeze blowing, and the countryside sparkled with color and life! This area was beautiful to me when I visited a week ago, and it was probably beautiful to them over 150 years ago. They lived hard lives, but I like to think that they had joy and contentment in their lives as well.

We looked for the old farmhouse referred to in my previous blog entry, but didn't find one with those exact characteristics. A local librarian told us that most of the old farmhouses in that specific area were gone. Over time, many of the small farms were bought up, replaced by a few much larger farms.

This trip was really an adventure for me, on many levels.

Louise