More dead than alive

This is what our California trip next month is turning out to be in terms of numbers of relatives we'll visit. I'm suddenly driven with a need to document/visit where my ancestors are buried and I'm not entirely certain why. Maybe it's been too long since I've been clubbing and cemetery wandering is a family activity. Maybe it's because nobody else ever has in my family and knowledge has a way of vanishing with time. 4-5 cemeteries are on the plan, possibly more depending on research until then.

Eventually I want Kieran to have a sense of the land he's from (or I'm getting way into anthropology as a result of class this quarter), that he's a part of a family that may be mostly extinct but once they lived, laughed, and loved in areas they had real attachments to. They were here before Washington was a state and left because Gold Rush wealth in California matched the family trade (carving marble tombstones) better. They were rich snobs in New York. They were humble farmers in Ohio. They married on our country's centennial birthday; my husband had his baby blessing on our country's bicentennial birthday. I was born on my 5x great-grandmother's bicentennial birthday. So many cool interactions!

I'm starting to find others who I can provide some missing pieces of living history stories besides names & dates to, and hope that some can do the same for me. Then I can weave it all together and give Kieran a sense of how it's all led us to where we are, a story I always wondered about for myself but never had.