Roots

/This little church and the accompanying graveyard are outside of Baker's Summit, Pennsylvania.  My grandfather was born here in 1860.  His name was Franklin Holsinger Myers.  He and his family moved to Illinois and then Kansas when he was a young boy.  His father died there and his mother remarried and moved back to Baker's Summit.  Somehow...my grandfather Frank moved back to Kansas and then back to Illinois when he was a young man.  A few years ago I was trying to find out what became of my grandfather's family.  I searched the records...and came up with some answers, but not all of them.  

What I did find out is that part of the Myers family is buried here...right across the road.  I had no idea what I was looking for when I stopped by early one morning when we were traveling back home to Missouri.  I had some information, but not a lot. I searched the rows looking for my great-grandmother's name...not knowing that she had remarried two years after my great-grandfather died in Kansas.  Such confusion.

Lucky stroke the following year....I chanced upon some information that told me about her new name, her children with her new husband, and the names of several relatives that lived in an adjoining town.

Early one morning...a year later....I returned to the cemetery across the road...and walked carefully down the rows, looking for her name.  And there she was.  And next to her was her second husband, my grandfather's stepfather.  

My dad's parents both passed away years before I was born.  But I know a lot of stories about them.  Their gentle ways, hard work ethic, and how they managed to raise a family during a difficult time with little work available and not much money coming in.  My aunts both told me that they never heard my grandparents fight or disagree.  They were loving people who always thought the best of others.. How I wish I had known them.

Which brings me back to the picture above.  As I stood there in the silence of that early summer morning, near the resting place of a woman who did not have an easy life, but who raised children that anyone would say were good people.  I looked across the road....her church, my family's church.  And that is how I know what foundation made these people who they were.  What a wonderful gift for me.  It was then and it still is.