All My Ancestors

It’s amazing what you can learn by just listening at family funerals.

I learned where one of my aunts was from–didn’t think it was all that interesting until I started looking for her family on the census. Her birth name is not the same as what I always knew her by. And her mother died when she was very young. I remember a light sort of going on when someone said where she was from–why hadn’t I ever asked that question?

Another aunt’s father was married 3 times–the wife I knew was #3 and quite a bit younger than him. Guess that could account for why she is almost contrary about digging for family history.

I also heard about a couple of arguments in the family, long ago, that account for some of what I saw growing up. I don’t want to go into detail here, but I never could figure out why there was such a gap between members of the same families who lived only 60 miles apart.

I didn’t go to that funeral hoping for more family information–I was glad that I’d gone to family reunion last month and that this wasn’t our only recent get-together. I went to honor my uncle, my dad’s brother. All his siblings were known and dear to me as a child–and now there are only two left. I went because that’s what we do in families–I went for the living. I enjoyed being in the cemetery where 3 generations of my family are buried–not because I’m glad they’re gone, but I am glad that I knew so many of them and it’s somehow meaningful to me that they are buried all together in the same cemetery. As the minister recited the “dust to dust” passage, it seemed especially appropriate–my family were farmers and they loved the land. It’s comforting to me to hear that “dust to dust” part because I think they’ve always viewed themselves as part of the land. As I told my brother, there was a lot of Osborne dust at that cemetery.

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