We started out on our way to Chicago with a slight detour to Green Bank, West Virginia to visit the Green Bank Radio Observatory, GBRO. For mid-April it was very cold and windy with snow at the higher elevations in Virginia and West Virginia. Up there in the mountains of western Virginia on US 250, we stopped at a wayside which marked the site of a Civil War era redout where the Confederates encamped trying to keep the Union troops from proceeding over the mountains into the Shenandoah Valley.
It was so cold there that we didn’t stay long although the view from there was beautiful and there were panels of historical information that we did not read. My camera apparently does not function well in the cold, so I could only take a couple of photos before it refused to work. It’s a place we will visit again in warmer weather.
On to GBRO where we toured the science center with its many exhibits about space, stars and the history of radio astronomy and vowed to return with the grandsons. It’s possible to walk or ride bikes around the entire grounds of the observatory, so that could be a good opportunity for bike riding.
Back on the road to Chicago, we stopped for the night in Richmond, Indiana, the very eastern-most point in Indiana on I-70 after Ohio.
We made it to Chicago on Tuesday morning and went directly to Bethania Cemetery to visit the grave of Henry’s parents, John and Margaret Lukas. It was a beautiful spring morning, perfect for strolling around a cemetery. The office was open so we went in and got a map with the general location of the gravesite marked on it by the helpful woman behind the counter. The gravesite was just a short walk away from the parking spot inside the gate and we had no trouble locating the spot where Henry’s parents are buried. It was easy to spot – it was just about the only one in the entire section with a flower arrangement on it. My father-in-law was diligent about ordering a decoration twice a year for the stone after my mother-in-law was buried in 1998 and I want to continue to remember them with the saddle bouquet that he always chose.
We looked around for any other familiar names and, of course, we found his grandparents, Anna and Jurgis Dumpis, his aunt and uncle, Maria and Emil Stanaitis, Martin and Victor Pauperas, two of three brothers of a family that Henry knew growing up in Chicago, and Franz Otto Leppert, a friend of the family.
After visiting the cemetery we went to the Racine Bakery and bought a loaf of Lithuanian rye bread. We ate lunch at the Three Brothers Restaurant which shared the parking lot with the bakery.
Back down the highway we went to Indianapolis. We spent the night south of the city and in the morning drove up to Holy Cross and St. Joseph Cemetery. Finding any familiar graves here was a much more difficult task than finding Henry’s family graves in Chicago. For one thing, we had never been to this cemetery, for another, the office was in a different location, so we did not have a map. I had copied down the locations from FindaGrave but it was difficult just to determine what comprised a section. There were some people in the cemetery doing lawn work but Henry stopped one man in a truck and asked if he knew about the layout. He filled us in on the history of the place. It had been two separate cemeteries which were merged into one. That explained the confusing number/letter combinations for the sections. He pointed us in the right direction and we found the markers for Margaret (RIng) and Daniel Lyons, my great-grandparents. Nearby were the markers for Helen Lyons Seiwert, one of their daughters, my grandmother’s sister, and next to her was a stone for John Seiwert with just ‘1925’ on it. He was Helen’s son, who was born prematurely and died shortly after birth.
Close to the Lyons grave were a number of stones with the name Quill on them. Daniel Lyons’ mother was Abigail Quill, so, maybe they are relatives. I don’t know that yet.
I remembered another interment I wanted to check. Hannah (Ring) Gleason, sister of Margaret (Ring) Lyons, was buried next to her husband, David Gleason. FindaGrave had photos of their grave marker, so I searched through quite a few aisles in the section indicated in their memorials and I was almost ready to give up when I found it. The cross on the top of their monument has fallen off and it’s on the ground in front of the stone, obscuring the names etched into it. I moved the cross to read the inscription and I couldn’t believe what I saw! In addition to the names of David and Hannah was the name Mary Ring. Mary was the elder sister of Hannah and Margaret. There is a memorial on FindaGrave for her but no photo of her stone. Now I know why – it was hidden behind the broken cross. I was very happy to see her name there and pay tribute to her. She emigrated from Ireland with her two sisters, never married but worked hard and managed to save enough money to buy a house in Indianapolis.
After the successful cemetery trip we went to downtown Indianapolis and visited the Indiana Historical Society. That is a place well worth a visit. There were exhibits with live re-enactors relaying the history of Methodist circuit riders and of an archeological dig of Native American burial mounds. We went into the library at the Historical Society but I really was not prepared with any questions so we took a look at a county history of Dearborn and Ohio Counties, which I have seen on Ancestry.com. I found something I hadn’t seen yet, however. In a list of soldiers in the War of 1812 was the name of Dr. Samuel Martin, my 3rd great-grandfather.
The next stop on our agenda was St. Ambrose Cemetery in Seymour, Indiana. We were keeping an eye on the threatening weather forecast for the next couple of days so we headed down to Seymour and found the cemetery on the main street. Again, there were men working on the landscaping. As we were asking them where we might start looking for the graves of John and Abigail (Quill) Lehane/Lyons, a man pedaled up on his bicycle. “That’s the man you want to ask. He knows everything.”, said the first man. It turns out it was Tom Melton who has created all of the FindaGrave memorials for the cemetery. He showed us to two stones for people with similar names – Timothy Lehan and his family and Timothy Leyhan, but there was no stone for John and Abby. Tom took my name and email address and promised to let me know anything about the church records.
Now we had to make a decision – where to next? Since hearing the name of the town of Rising Sun, Indiana, I have wanted to go there. That’s where William English Reed, my 2nd great-grandfather was born. After eating at Crossroads Restaurant in Versailles, Indiana, we took a look at the map and decided to drive to Rising Sun by way of Dillsboro. The road we took, Indiana 262, is a narrow, winding road that follows a creek on its way down to the Ohio River. After a rather harrowing drive, we got to Rising Sun. We parked on a street in the small town and took a walk to the river.
It was a beautiful late afternoon, with a lovely breeze blowing across the river. We saw a couple of people sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of an old hotel (202 years old!) and we asked them if indeed this was a hotel and they answered in the affirmative. We found the proprietor who told us she had a room available, so we registered and took a walk around town. There’s a riverboat casino a couple blocks north of the hotel so we walked up there to check it out.
The proprietor of the hotel told us about a ferry that runs between Rising Sun and Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, so we planned on spending the $5 for the adventure of crossing the Ohio River on a ferry.
The next day we had breakfast at a nice little diner in Rising Sun, packed up our things and went north of town to catch the ferry across the Ohio River. On through Kentucky and West Virginia, with a detour along an alternate route to I-64 through West Virginia and we made it home before any storms caught up with us.
What I learned from this trip, first of all, is that there are some very nice people in Indiana. As far as genealogy research goes, being in the area where the ancestors lived was invaluable. Looking at maps certainly is helpful in visualising the lives of ancestors but driving past fields on which they grazed livestock, following a road along a rocky creek bed they most likely traveled with horse and buggy, and walking the same streets they walked to shop and tend to business was truly an inspiration. I am going to learn as much as I can about them and the lives that they led.