Little Egypt Heritage Articles Stories of Southern Illinois Bill Oliver 4 May 2003 Vol 2 Issue: #17 ISBN: pending Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen of Little Egypt, As a retired educator, reading is a passion, as is learning something new. Recently, I've been reading about all the latest and greatest in digital picture printing. This led me into website authoring with lots of bells and whistles. The next step was to read about accessibility on the World Wide Web. To my woe, I like so many other webmeisters, have become so wrapped up in the appearance of the sites that we have lost sight of the purpose we genealogists and historians started with in the days before the general use of the WWW. The TV programs CSI, CSI Miami, plus the newest spin off of JAG, all talk about crime solving via the latest and greatest ... technology. Wow, what a budget the Los Vegas Crime Lab must have. :) The original purpose was to make data available to researchers. And, the purpose of these articles is heritage ... the history of our families and the heritage that they brought with them. So, I guess it would be best to get back to that purpose. Today, we are wrapped up with the increase in crime solving through modern forensics. Modern forensics with the latest and greatest. Where the single strand of fiber analyzed in the latest high tech laboratory proves to determine who-done-it. Genealogists, family historians, and anthropologists are now very interested in the forensics of what bones can teach us. Skeleton bones are jigsaw puzzles. The bones can tell us someone's age, sex, race, height, and their dominant handedness — left or right. However, we seldom, if every, actually get to read our ancestral bones. So, we have to just dream about what the bones could tell us about our ancestors. We have to still use good old Sherlock Holmes techniques of deduction to put the flesh back on our ancestors bones. One place we can use to teach us are the grave sites. The soul of the ancestor is there. As our European ancestors spread out from the east coast across the continent, traditions of burial and memorializing spread with them and adapted to the new conditions. As they traveled families left behind family members, and subsequently the left a fragment of ritual or artifact to ease the feelings of vulnerability in this enormously large and undeveloped land. The loss of a loved one magnified the feelings of the new and strange, thus to relieve this, they would fall back on the familiar and comfortable. This often meant old world monuments displayed in and across the heartland of America. Our cemeteries are full of religious imagery. The Lutheran austere markers, the very passionate Hispanic folk art. There are stern verses of scripture on limestone tablets versus the free spirited phrases depicting character, such as "World's greatest truck driver" or "I'd rather be drag racing". City metropolis cemeteries usually display the more ornate monuments adorned with surrogate mourners gazing shyward toward the heavens. Wealth usually played a definite part in just how ornate. While on the treeless prairies along the Oregon Trail, migrating families did their best with the limestone found locally, yet still reflected the rudeness of migratory burials. Materials for monuments have varied with locations and times. Limestone was the most common stone in pioneer days. Marble was used in the late 19th century. Wood and sometimes wrought iron were used when stone was too costly. Scandinavians and Germans fashioned wrought iron crosses. My Swiss-German ancestors are so marked in Nebraska. Sandstone and slate were used in areas where available. The durability of granite was difficult in early days to allowed for only low relief motifs and lettering. Concrete found its way into the list of materials because it could be shaped and decorated nearly at the will of the artist. Mosaics could be made by placing items such as telephone insulators, marbles and even seashells.. Cast iron markers mounted on decorative bases can mark where French or Bavarian folk predominate. Swedish crosses sometimes have artifacts in the form of hearts or geometric shapes decorating them. In Lincoln, Nebraska airplane propellers were used to mark graves. Though cemeteries today are often quite level, early cemeteries were on hills and otherwise land difficult to farm. Throughout the heartland, cemeteries accompany churches, thereby separating ethnic and religious groups. Further segregation was fostered by fraternal organizations such as the Odd Fellows, the Masons, the Elks, and the Rebekah Lodge. A type of monument insurance company called the International Order of Woodmen of the World furnished monuments in the form of sawed wood or tree stumps or even stacks of wood, dot heartland cemeteries. In fact simulated wood motif markers became so popular that they don't always now indicate the Woodmen group. J Sterling Morton, father of Arbor Day and his family have tall tree trunk monuments and horizontal logs in Nebraska City, Nebraska. Out in Hiawatha, Kansas is the Davis Memorial, which is quite unusual. It is a collection of life sized likenesses of the John and Sarah Davis, with several statues depicting various ages of the couple. Carved in Italy, it is estimated that it cost a half million dollars and took the decade of the 1930s to complete. It is further said that John Davis spent this sum of money for the memorial to prevent Sarah's relatives from inheriting his money. The story continues to say that Sarah's family thought she could do better than John Davis. The union was childless. Some of the figures have been damaged by vandals, but there are photographs available to show the record. Even one of the statues of John Davis had a thigh high vertical log behind his left leg. And, the final set of carvings has Mr Davis sitting in a chair and beside him is an empty stone chair with carved letters .... "The Vacant Chair". Wado, Bill -=- Other sites worth visiting: http://www.rense.com/general32/cxcol.htm http://www.earthsky.com/BBS/Observers-Notebook/19x18.html http://www.earthsky.com/BBS/Observers-Notebook/19x104.html http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/SOIL http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/ILMASSAC http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ne/state/BillsArticles/LittleEgypt/intro.html