We are part of an age old story.
People. Places. Events.
Living consists of the day to day 'stuff of life' that happens to us during our time on earth. A desire to find one's place to be. A place to call home. A way to make a living. And in the midst of all this, unforeseen events intersect our lives causing change to happen ...
birth... love... loss... sickness... health... feast... famine... migration... peace... protest...
but, in the end, when all is said and done, all of that is laid to rest... and time passes by. The hopes, the dreams, experiences and desires of that life fade away, and like the setting sun, only the trace of life is left behind. These are the recorded 'footprints' of that time on earth. Graveyard Chronicles is the unearthing of those footprints and the piecing together of the lives of our ancestors.
In preparation for the Bicentennial, my mother began genealogical researching her father's ancestry. My gr gr Aunt Evelyn (the younger sister of my grandfather's father) was the 'keeper of the family stories'. She had a 17th century needlepoint sampler telling the lives of an earlier generation, her mother's family Bible, and the personal effects of her father, a veteran of the Civil War. She had a lifetime of unwritten stories from the Parker & Hanson family lines. This is where it all started. Weekends were spent with my mother, walking through old graveyards searching for names of ancestors on century old gravestones. I found myself wondering about the names, forever engraved in stone, and what life was like when they were living. I would rub my fingers across their stones, whispering their names, and wondering when the last time it had been was spoken.
Technology has made tracing one's ancestry easier than it was a few decades ago. With the availability of millions of online records - vital records, legal documents, land grants, gravestone records, as well as family & genealogical compilations can now be searched 'virtually' saving hundreds of research hours. Second only to gardening, genealogy is America's favorite hobby. A graduate of Boston University's Certificate in Genealogical Research, my primary focus is 17th and 18th century New England genealogy & history. Beginning a discovering of your own family history or applying to a lineage society, Graveyard Chronicles can help unearth the stories of your own age old story.