The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Make Memorial Day truly memorable
This story was published May 14, 2000
Editors note: This Memorial Day column appeared in the Herald several years ago. We're running a slightly revised version as the holiday again approaches.
Shortly before his death in 1965, Somerset Maugham told his nephew Robin "Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it."
Unfortunately, millions of Americans seem to be following Maugham's whimsical advice. Of course they cannot avoid death, which comes to all.
But too often they can and do avoid anything that reminds them of death. They avoid funerals and cemeteries.
Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn lamented this phenomenon in his culture:
"Above all else we have grown to fear death and those who die. If there is a death in a family we try to avoid writing or calling because we do not know what to say about death."
In America we also avoid visiting cemeteries on Memorial Day or any other day. In droves we flee into the mountains and canyons, we picnic and camp, canoe and boat. We will do almost anything but think about our dead.
Perhaps I'm just becoming a doddering curmudgeon, but it seems this problem has grown vastly worse since 1971, when Memorial Day was shifted to the Monday of a three-day party-hearty weekend.
Are we witnessing anything less than the cleavage of the living from the dead?
For some, cemetery visits are maudlin, if not morbid. A sadness best avoided. For others, they are a joyous celebration of life. I presume this is what authors Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein had in mind when they wrote A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, in 1977.
They advocate a presence of our dead among the living. No people who turn their backs on death can be alive, they wrote. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society that encourages its people to live. Huge cemeteries on the outskirts of cities, or in places no one ever visits, impersonal funeral rites, taboos that hide the fact of death from children, all conspire to keep the fact of death away from us, the living.
For me there is something healthy and strengthening about standing a few minutes in front of a headstone, thinking pleasant thoughts about an ancestor or other relative.
My family does something different every Memorial Day weekend and haven't decided yet what we will do this year, but it definitely will include honoring our dead.
One Memorial Day weekend, Ruth and I decorated the graves of 14 members of pervious generations of Days. We visited seven cemeteries in eight Washington and Idaho cities. Besides the incomparable joy of Ruth's company as we drove more than 700 miles on that Memorial Day weekend, I enjoyed many pleasant, spiritually nourishing thoughts. And, yes, a few sad reflections.
There was the pain of visiting the grave of a nephew who died as a teen-ager in Seattle, and my visits to the grave of my Great-uncle Maurice Day always are tinged with sadness. Maurice lies on a desolate hillside above Asotin. Once so full of exuberant life, he died March 12, 1905, of a concussion. He was 16 months old when he put his feet against the table and pushed his high chair over backwards.
But visiting the graves of my Aunt Nettie and Uncle Frank Montague in the Riverview Cemetery in Kennewick brings fond memories of summer weeks spent on their farm near Hover on the Columbia River and Thanksgiving feasts in their home.
At my stepfather's grave in Pasco, I'm filled with gratitude. Who could not admire Chester James Vinnedge? He married a widow with five children between the ages of 15 and 4, and was a good father to us all.
A flood of secondhand memories wash over me when I visit the grave of my paternal grandfather's stepmother, in Ellensburg.
Anna Amelia Koecke was born in Germany in 1849. In 1872, she married my great-grandfather, a widower with two children, in Iowa.
She bore him seven more children. Family lore says that she reverted to speaking in German as she lay on her death bed in 1918, and there was no one who could understand her utterances.
And so it goes, from cemetery to cemetery, from grave to grave. There is something deeply gratifying in pursuit of this ancient custom of placing flowers on graves.
Its origins are lost in antiquity. Anthropologists report finding wild flowers strewn on the grave of a middle-aged man buried 44,000 years ago in Iraq. It seems a shame to let the custom slip away.
I suspect genealogists are well represented among those who practice this ancient tradition. The occasion reminds me of a worthy project for genealogists. This year, why not take a notebook to the cemeteries you visit and draw a diagram that shows where your family members are buried? Then pass these diagrams on to future generations.