http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=595212&category=ALBANY&BCCode=&newsdate=6/5/2007 It is an interesting story about a cemetery field trip from today's 5 June 2007 issue of the Times Union newspaper in Albany. Cliff Lamere

That story makes me think of one of my research trips from a few years ago. Hope no minds minds if I share: About four of years ago my mother and I were planning a cemetery research trip up to Kinderhook hoping to locate the grave sites for a number of people I found listed in the cemetery index on your site. We had just started the drive up to Kinderhook from our home in Ossining when my sister, who worked on Saturdays at the time, called to say her babysitter had a family emergency and couldn't watch the kids. Deciding we'd have to put our trip on hold, we changed course to head to my sister's house, which at that point wasn't far at all. My nephew Michael, then 10, was surprised we arrived so quickly and we explained the circumstances to him. Much to our surprise he said he wanted to go "collect dead relatives," which is a term I often use for this hobby. His sister Deanna, then 7, joined in saying she wanted to as well. So, the four of us loaded ourselves into my SUV and off we went. Overall, I got less research done than I normally would have, but it was still one of the most enjoyable research trips I've ever undertaken. The kids really surprised me by getting into it, especially my nephew. He was very serious with his copy of the list of names (thankfully I'd had made extra in order have backup copies), going methodically up and down the rows looking for the names on his list. He was the first to find one that matched and was he ever excited about that. I was able to pull out a chart to show him how the person fit into the tree and what the relationship to him was. He was hooked for the rest of the morning, walking those rows looking for more matches. My niece, meanwhile, had spent most of the morning wandering about just enjoying the warm day. All of a sudden she came over and said she had to show me something "really sad." She took me back over to a small headstone with a lamb on top. The grave was that of an infant, and one that died on the same day it was born. She wanted to know why that grave and most of the others didn't have flowers on them. My father had died recently and we had taken flowers to his grave the last time they had visited. I told her that the baby had died a long time ago and there was likely no one left alive who even knew the baby was buried there to bring it flowers. She just said "OH," and I thought that was the end of it. Shortly thereafter we left to go into Valatie to get something to eat and take a bathroom break. We then spent some time showing the kids where family members had lived over a hundred years ago in Valatie, where an ancestor's blacksmith shop had been located, and looking at the waterfall where one of the old mills had been located. We were just discussing it being time to head home when my niece declared, in that way little girls have, that we could NOT go home until we had put flowers on the graves. I forget now where we found them, but we bought a bouquet of flowers and stopped back at the cemetery on the way home. We separated the flowers and I told Deanna she could start putting them on the graves we'd found. I wasn't surprised when that long gone baby received the first gift of flowers. Both kids, four years later, still make references to the day we went to "collect dead relatives." Both still take an interest whenever I discover something new and want to know "how it fits" into the chart. All the result of a morning spent in warm sunshine and connecting with the past. Cliff Lamere wrote: > http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=595212&category=ALBANY&BCCode=&newsdate=6/5/2007 > > It is an interesting story about a cemetery field trip from today's 5 > June 2007 issue of the Times Union newspaper in Albany. > > Cliff Lamere > > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message > > >