Memorial Day 2014

Over the past few months I have committed to a project that grew directly out of my interest in family history.  One of the best way I have of locating relatives buried around the country is by searching the Find a Grave web site.  I'm found dozens of people this way, complete with their dates of birth and death, their spouses, children, siblings, and often photos as well.  I decided that I would pay it back by adding memorials for people in the oldest sections of Oak Hill cemetery here in Janesville. 

Doing this involves going to the library and copying out listings for the cemetery from a book written by the local genealogy society, who walked the cemetery and searched the old card files which recorded all the burials, including numerous ones with no stones.  But I also search census records and newspaper archives to fill out more about the people I record.  Where were they born?  What did they do for a living?  Where did they live?  Were they veterans?  Now that the weather is good I also walk the cemetery and photograph headstones.  This is a double check for the information on the memorials - dates sometimes were entered incorrectly, or names misspelled.  But also, often the older monuments are beautiful on their own - all those headstones with clasped hands, willow trees, anchors, or little lambs, the monuments with maidens pointing to heaven,  draped columns, and classical obelisks. It is a pleasure to photograph them and share them online.

Oak Hill has an old Gothic stone chapel that once served as a place for funeral services, but has fallen, in recent years, into disrepair.  A group of local history and architecture enthusiasts stepped forward after the city proposed tearing down the building, and raised money to restore the chapel.  I went to this group and suggested I lead a series of free informal walks in the cemetery this spring and summer, and then give people brochures describing how they can help in the chapel restoration project.  They have been wonderfully enthusiastic and supportive of my project.

My first walk was May 10th, and nice publicity and fine weather led to a turnout of more than fifty people.  The first walk featured the monuments of people who started Janesville businesses long ago, and whose businesses are still going strong.  This photo is of the Gray family monument.  They were Irish immigrants who came to Janesville and started a beverage company that made soda and beer, and still does.

I plan three more of these walks, and am having a good time planning the walks, though writing the scripts does take some time.  But I think it's worth the effort to get people out walking in our beautiful and historic cemetery, familiarize them with a little bit of local history, and encourage them to support the restoration of a historic building.  I also encourage people to create online memorials for people in their own families, using Find a Grave.  My hope is that activities like this will encourage people to talk about their family history with their children, and to share information in a format that is widely accessible and easy to understand. 

One thought.  Through recording old burials and searching for headstones of veterans, I find many that are sadly neglected.  Perhaps all the family members have passed away, or do not live near the cemetery.  In Oak Hill there is a section for veterans, but many of graves of the men and women who served in the military are not located in the military section.  It would be wonderful of folks would adopt these neglected graves, occasionally wipe them clean, add some flowers.  It would be a fine and easy act of charity.

Memorial Day, 2008

Grandma Nora, Great Grandma Sarah, Great Grandpa Donaldson, Uncle Hawley

I have a clear memory of being about fifth grade, and being in a school program at the Sugar Creek Town Hall.  My class was part of a Memorial Day program that included singing songs (from the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli), and reciting poetry (in Flanders fields the poppies grow...).  We all received little flags and marched about a block across county highway A to Mount Pleasant cemetery, where local veterans of Korea or World War II made speeches, shot off guns, and a good time was had by all.  This particular year Jake. R. was supposed to recite In Flanders Field, but he conveniently missed the program and I recited it instead.  He knew I was a show-off. 

Mount Pleasant is indeed pleasant.  Situated on high hill that looks over flat farm field surrounding it, the cemetery has stones going back to 1853.  My mother was big on putting together flowers for all of her and Dad's relatives, and she let me help assembling flower boxes to put on the graves.  I clearly remember driving up the steep hill to the oldest part of the graveyard, though in those days none of the names on the stones had any meaning for me.  The idea of the people under the sod was abstract, unlike now when many of the names on the stones have faces attached in my mind.  

I stopped by yesterday to make another attempt to find my great grandparents headstones. Both Cornelius (Con) Donaldson and his wife Sarah are buried there, according to my records. His parents came from Norway, hers from Ireland.  The only things I know about them are what I find in old photographs, and notes my mom got from Grandpa Pierce.  It didn't help that Mother never referred to either of them as Grandma or Grandpa, simply calling them Con and Sarah.  It took years before I understood they were my Grandma Pierce's parents.  Anyway, I didn't mind walking the rows on a sunny, windy day looking for their names.  Unfortunately, I didn't succeed in finding their headstones this trip either.  But I did copy down a telephone number for information from a signpost, so perhaps I can find a person with a map of where people are buried.  Then I can continue Mother's tradition of decorating all the family graves sites.

Late update: A telephone call to a man named Lee G. who has all the cemetery records was interesting. One of the first things he asked me was "Are you at the cemetery?"  Must be that people looking for lost relatives call on their cell phones.  When I said I was at home he was obliging in describing where I could find the graves I wanted.  Turned out they were near the place I remembered, but much further in the row.  I gave up too soon the other day.  Mystery solved.

November 11, 1918

Howard Funk Tess, about 1913

One of the interesting things for me in rereading my grandmother’s story is being able to research the places she mentions on the internet. I’ve had great fun looking for old photos of places like the Blatz Hotel and Riverside High School (which opened in 1906), though I failed to find a photo of the celebration of the end of the war in downtown Milwaukee. In this part of her story she tells what the end of World War I was like for her. I couldn’t find any pictures of Grandma at this time, but I had one of her future husband, my grandfather, in his World War I uniform. He was an MP in France, though I never heard him say a word about his war experiences, other than the trip over made him very, very seasick.

“My school year was drawing to a close and there were changes ahead for all of us. Mother quit her job at the home for unwed mothers, and now was managing a rooming house on lower Broadway that catered to light housekeeping couples. I helped her at work and I baby-sat for Durell. Her was eighteen months and into everything. It was wonderful to be together again, but our style of living hit an all-time low. The old brick building was one in a block of row houses, with only a brick wall separating them. There were no windows except in the front and back walls. It was so dark that the rooms and halls had to be lit with gas lights, even on the brightest days. The place was furnished with an assortment of old and broken down pieces from a secondhand store. Our rooms were in back on the alley, a small kitchen and even smaller living room and a bedroom. I slept on the couch; Mother and Durell had the bedroom. There was only one bathroom in the whole house; six families shared it. . .

We saw more of father. He came for dinner every other Sunday. We ate in our kitchen that smelled of gas, even the food tasted of gas.

In the fall I entered Riverside High School (later called East Division High School), a long streetcar ride from our downtown Milwaukee address. I don’t know why they decided to send me there. As far as I was concerned, one school was just like another. . .

World War I had been going on through all our upheavals, but as I look back it had surprising little effect on our lives. Father went for a short time to a training camp at Great Lakes, but received a deferral and was back in school. We had no one close to us in the service, so we were wrapped up in our struggle to survive. Although the war seemed far away, it was a happy day on November 18, (1918) when we learned that the war was over. School let out at noon, and most of us headed for downtown Milwaukee, where everyone seemed to have gone crazy. Complete strangers were hugging and kissing. Sirens were shrilling and cars honking, a noisy tribute to victory. The air was full of confetti and balloons. Grand Avenue, now Wisconsin Avenue, was a seething shouting mass of humanity. No traffic could penetrate the river of bodies that stretched for blocks. All the stores were closed and most windows boarded up to prevent breakage or looting. My fun ended suddenly when someone threw a tin of talcum powder at me. Most of it went into my eyes. I was temporarily blinded and the pain was terrific. I was taken home where I lay for two days with compresses on my eyes. The swelling finally went down and I could see. That is my most vivid memory of the triumphant end of World War I.”

Memorial Day

It’s Memorial Day, a day that has meant different things me me at different times in my life. When I was in grade school we had programs, sometimes in the gym and sometimes at the town hall. Once I recited In Flanders Fields and I had no real idea what it was about. I remember practicing patriotic songs like God Bless America and the Marine’s Hymn. We children marched up to the little country cemetery and put paper flags on graves, and then we all went home and had a picnic to celebrate the end of the school year and the start of summer.

For years another part of Memorial Day, Mom called it Decoration Day, was to get all the metal planters back from Millard Cemetery, Tibbets Cemetery, Hazel Ridge Cemetery in Elkhorn, and the German Settlement Cemetery over near East Troy. Then the planters would be sanded, repainted, weighted down and refilled with fresh artificial flowers. That’s an oxymoron. Then off we’d go, to decorate the graves. I never knew the grandparents, great grandparents, great aunts and great uncles whose graves received her attention, and as she got older my mother decorated fewer markers. I went off to college and then got a teaching job, and I didn’t go out to the cemeteries with her, except a couple times after Dad died. I guess I left it to her because I was too busy. Finally she stopped decorating altogether, unable to get out, forbidden to drive because of poor health.

I’ve taken up decorating graves now. After my mother died a few years ago I made it my task to remember my relatives who have gone before me. And now I know almost all of them, parents, grandparents, even my youngest sister. I take flowers, and grass clippers, and a whisk broom, and I remember them all.

One grave in particular stands out this year, a year when we are thinking again as a nation about the sacrifices families make in times of war. My maternal grandfather, Howard Tess, served in World War I in France. I know from his obituary in1970 that he was a private in the 7th Military Police Company, and that he served in France. I have a picture of him looking impossibly young in his uniform, looking nothing like the grandpa I loved. I know from my mother that the only things he ever told her was that the journey to France by boat made him dreadfully seasick, and that he hated the rats in the trenches. I never heard him speak of his war experiences, ever. When I asked Grandma, shortly before her death a couple years ago, about his time in the war, she said she didn’t remember. What was war like for him? I’ll never know, and I wish I did. So now all I can do is remember the kind man, the master bell-spinner who also worked for the war effort in World War II, when his band equipment factory (Holtons) made munitions, the man who never spoke of his serving his country, but who surely did. At least he came home after his service.