Hope Creek
During the 80s & 90s we made a good team. We had talked by phone but met for the first time by both both coming to Baldwin. We went to the Patrick Cemetery in Madison County, to enumerate the graves for publication by the Madison County Genealogical & Historiacal Society. That cemetery was only one of many we read together in the southern part of the county. I was a "furriner" so she supplied the knowledge and I transcribed our pages onto computer. Once we were trying to find a "lost" cemetery on Mill Creek Road and came across an elderly bachelor Troy Mullen, whose father was buried there & he was the caretaker. He knew the names for many of the fieldstone graves. It was the Bea Patrick/Van Brunt Cemetery. The following week, a professor from Calif was in Springdale doing family research. He called me and asked by a remote chance did I know the location of his great-grandparents'graves? I said if you had called 2 wks earlier, I would have had to say no, but now I could tell him we could take him right to their fieldstone graves that Troy had identified. We picked up Faye and off we went. He was moved to tears and soon ordered tombstones for their graves. I think God had a hand in that! Another time. we were on a very rutted dirt road to find another "lost" cemetery. Back to civilization, we stopped at a house to ask if they knew any thing about it. The man said yes, but he said you can't get to it with a car on this road, you have to go south of St Paul to reach it. Faye gave one of her deep chuckles and said "WE'VE JUST COME FROM THERE! We started reading the BIG Riverside Cemetery at St Paul on their June Decoration Day so we could get info from visiting families. Once, we were at the end of a row, Faye was reading & I was writing. She was backing up and tumbled downhill into the dry ditch. Another chuckle from Faye as she dusted herself off and climbed back up. As June turned into July, the heat got worse and we had 2 rows left. We discussed going and returning the 30 plus miles back for only 2 rows. We instead sat under a tree & "rested a spell." We noticed a big old dead treenearby with two turkey buzzards on a branch, just waiting for us to keel over. After a few minutes, we cooled off & finished the cemetery!We also spent countless hours writing down the data from BIG leather-bound County Marriage Books for the Society to print.Those are good memories to look back on.Hope Creek