Comments on: Our Dead II

By: Our Dead V: Memorial Day at St. Paul’s Cathedral « ABEV: a bird’s eye view

Tue, 29 May 2012 22:30:26 +0000

[...] IV, Part III, Part II 1/2, Part II, Part I St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, England (source: [...]

By: Our Dead IV « ABEV: a bird’s eye view

Our Dead IV « ABEV: a bird’s eye view — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:08:56 +0000

[...] Dead IV Part III, Part II ½, Part II, Part [...]

By: Our Dead III « ABEV: a bird’s eye view

Our Dead III « ABEV: a bird’s eye view — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:12:52 +0000

[...] resting place of our dead. I described our previous excursions in the following posts: Our Dead, Our Dead II, and Convert [...]

By: Convert Ancestor « ABEV: a bird’s eye view

Convert Ancestor « ABEV: a bird’s eye view — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:31:15 +0000

[...] I recently posted about the visit my family and I made on Memorial Day to the cemetary in Pershore, England where my [...]

By: Ronan

Ronan — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:09:10 +0000

Yep, and you and I may have faced each other across a wicket in 1991!

By: john f.

john f. — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:41:57 +0000

Ronan, you’re right that there is and must be some measure of drama behind the fact that Timothy lies in Pershore and his son John lies in Utah. I referred to the sense of humility that this knowledge invoked in the post. We know more of the details behind this situation but I can’t remember them well enough to have discussed them in the post. Suffice it to say that I believe you’re right that there is a lot of pain in this tale. One wonders what might have happened if Timothy had accepted the Gospel and travelled to Utah with his family, how having him around out there might have influenced the future of the family down to the present day. One also contemplates the outcome had Eliza and John not converted but stayed back in Pershore where generations of their posterity might still have lived and died.

By: Ronan

Ronan — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:27:59 +0000

Wonderful, John, but sad too. I feel very sorry for Timothy in many ways. Can we imagine how it would feel if our children joined another religion and moved to the other side of the world, never to be seen again. There’s a lot of pain in this tale.

I know Pershore well, being only a spit and a blink from Malvern. I played cricket near that church when I was a kid. I’m tickled that you’re from Worcestershire too!

By: john f.

john f. — Thu, 31 May 2007 10:26:10 +0000

Cool experience Pete. Thanks for your comment. Seeing the geographical setting in which your ancestors lived can be a magical experience — at least it always is for me.

By: Pete

Pete — Tue, 29 May 2007 20:57:37 +0000

Great post.

I had the opportunity to reflect upon my ancestors as I drove through West Virginia into Maryland over the weekend. My great great great great grandfather Walter died from wounds sustained in the battle of Harpers Ferry in West Virginia. There Stonewall Jackson surrounded a Union garrison and killed over 200 Northern soldiers, capturing over 12,000, before gathering his troops and proceeding to nearby Antietam, in Maryland, perhaps the bloodiest battle in American military history. Even though I did not have time to actually stop at any grave sites, etc., I strongly felt a sense of kinship with and gratitude to my predecessor, Walter, who had emigrated from Newcastle on Tyne to Pennsylvania before he joined the Northern Army. Walter did not join the Church, but his son, also named Walter, did, and he ultimately moved his family to Utah to be part of the Mormon community.

By: john f.

john f. — Tue, 29 May 2007 20:08:18 +0000

Thanks William. My dad grew up in Sanpete County with a strong sense of Memorial Day, as he has told me, in that you simply didn’t do anything on Memorial Day if not pay a substantive visit to the town cemetary to visit the graves of generations worth of ancestors. Growing up far from the graves of family, however, actually visiting ancestors’ graves was not an activity I really ever did to celebrate Memorial Day; consequently, the holiday really never had any meaning for me until just three years ago, when I moved to SLC and for the first time lived near the graves of relatives. (To be sure, while at BYU I lived within an hour or two of ancestors’ graves but even that is different than living 12 minutes — or one neighborhood — away.) Now, actually using Memorial Day to visit ancestors’ graves is something that has become important to me.