That's priceless. What a gift to your childen! The love of family history. Linda ----- Original Message ----- From: gloria m rodas <gloriamlh@juno.com> To: <TNBEDFOR-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Monday, May 27, 2002 10:42 PM Subject: [TNBEDFOR] A (hopefully) pertinent to gen research Memorial Day msg. My son and I, along with a friend , and her 4 children went together to various area cemeteries today to check on the stones of our ancestors, clean them, remember the ones we knew and discuss our discoveries of the ones we did not know. Our children range in age from 18 down to 3. We saw the three year old picking moss with her soft baby fingers off of a 104 year old gravestone, and we saw the 18 year old holding the kids up to the window of a family tomb and reading them the plaques located in the gloom of the closed interior. We found the 8 year old looking for the oldest grave, the dirtiest grave, the prettiest, we saw a ten year old picking grass from around flat cement stones, and remember the gravesite of his 4th great grandfather, when he'd only seen it once before. We saw all of them, along with ourselves, having our eyes and our attention caught, not by the graves with the largest or brightest display of flowers, but by those graves so long in place that they could not even be identified, those grave plots so large, with so many members of the same surname, the moss and lichen obliterating the names and dates... and there were more than can be imagined. Each one of us took extra flowers and read the stones we could, and we remembered them, as best we could, by what was written there. Where the stone was worn and bare of fact we cleaned a few weeds and placed a little offering there, not to the spirit long departed, but to God, who knows them all. I hope that your departed loved ones near and far have had someone visit them today. God Bless. gloria ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ============================== To join Ancestry.com and access our 1.2 billion online genealogy records, go to: http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=571&sourceid=1237