Memorial Day
Yesterday the cashier at Staples politely asked me what my plans were for the Memorial Day weekend. I told her I would be going to the cemetery to decorate the graves. She smiled at me pityingly and then continued to ring up my purchases. Since Memorial Day also marks the beginning of the summer vacation season, she must have felt sorry that I had no barbeque or boating trip planned. When I was growing up, I would meet Grandma Barker early in the morning to help her fill the large funeral baskets with blooms freshly picked from her garden. She would cut and I would arrange and then we would take them to the Kaysville Cemetery where we would findwhole families out cleaning the headstones and arranging peonies.
I can't speak for the rest of the country, but in Utah the cemeteries are filled with pots of mums and vases of iris placed on graves of all the ancestors. We called it Decoration Day and may have roots in the southern tradition of holding a religious service and eating a potluck picnic at family grave sites after decorating the grave. That's my Memorial Weekend.
As my grandchildren help me locate the graves in a bit-too-rambunctious treasure hunt - there is always one grave site that will not be easily located, I remember the earliest family members to be baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint. Some sailed from Liverpool or Bristol, some migrated from New England. I think of them crossing the plains and the words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic come to mind. Were they not Christian soldiers, marching on to war? Can you not picture them gathered around a hundred circling camps in the fire and lamp light? My grandson, Brooks, who is on a church mission in West Virginia, challenged his mom to search out the first members in each family and find where and when they were baptized. For you, Brooks:
I
have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They
have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I
can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His
day is marching on.
Glory,
glory, hallelujah!
Glory,
glory, hallelujah!
Glory,
glory, hallelujah!
His
day is marching on.
None of the Foys, Finks, Binghams, Freemans, Gates, Farrs, or Plumleys were buried in the Kaysville or Bountiful cemeteries so I was not able to visit their graves this year. They traveled to the Salt Lake Valley and then were called to settle Zion throughout the west.
Foy & Fink
Catherine Fink [wife of Thomas Birk Foy] 1809-1870; Baptism probably 1842 at the same time as husband. Pennsylvania -
Endowed 1846 Nauvoo; Couple sealed by Heber C. Kimball in the home of Willard Richards, Winter Quarters. Received patriarchal blessing from Hyrum Smith; Pioneered in 1850 with Snow -Young Company - age 40 - when she contracted cholera. Died in Minersville, Utah.Bingham & Gates
Erastus Bingham, Jr. [father of Lucinda Maria Bingham] 1822-1906; Baptized 1833; Called to build roads for the trek west. Joined Mormon Battalion to California and then back to Salt Lake Valley soon after the advanced company arrived. Met his wife and parents in Wyoming on the way west. Died in Arizona.
Olive Hovey Freeman [wife of Erastus Bingham, Jr.] 1820-1905; Born in Vermont; Baptized ;Endowed 1846 Nauvoo; Pioneer 1847 Spencer-Eldredge Co. – age 27 - being ill when husband found her on the plains of Wyoming. Died in Idaho.
Thomas Gates [father of Lucinda Gates] 1776-1851; Born in New Hampshire; Married in Vermont; Baptized 1833 and then went with family to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1836. Subsequently moved to Far West, Missouri, in 1836, but was evicted by mob rule, escaping to Illinois 1839; Endowed 1845 in Nauvoo; Pioneered in 1847 with the Spencer- Eldredge Co. – age 71, widower. Died in Salt Lake City, Utah Territory.
Sources:
http://digitalheritage.org/2010/08/decoration-day/
http://thestonerabbit.typepad.com/the_stone_rabbit/gardening/
Family Search and Ancestry online family trees
No comments:
Post a Comment