I retired in 2019. When asked how I planned to spend my time, I responded:
My husband and I lived in Lawrence, Kansas, from 1996 until 2002. When I started a new job, my commute took me past a cemetery. During my first week, I noticed a woman who stood beside a gravestone and held a book as if reading to her loved one.
The next morning, when I passed the cemetery, I looked in the same direction and saw her again. My curiosity was piqued so on the way home from work, I drove into the cemetery. What I mistook for a woman was a monument for a 12-year-old girl who died in 1916.
The gravestone read:
We had a little treasure
She was our joy and pride
We loved her, ah, perhaps too much
For soon she slept and died
All is dark within our dwelling
Lonely are our hearts today
For the one we loved so dearly
Has forever passed away.
Obviously loved, I wondered about her, her family, and how she died. The folks in the cemetery office only knew that in 1916 her family paid for three additional gravesites they never used.
Being pre-Ancestry.com, I asked about her at the Kansas Department of Records but could not obtain her death certificate or even learn her cause of death.
Over the years, this little girl took up residency in the back of my brain. She reminded me of her existence every so often. Once Ancestry.com was available I learned more about her and her family. After I researched her family tree, I became interested in her grandfather, who was born in England. He existed in this world; I have been to his grave but what I wrote about him is pure fiction.
This story follows his journey from the sheltered confines of his family’s farm in England. The death of his mother caused his alcoholic father to drink again. Encouraged by his grandmother, he decided to leave his father, once a kind and loving man, who now threatened his safety.
To ensure his father could not find him, he decided to go to America. On his adventure, he learned about the world outside his village. He sailed the Atlantic Ocean, walked the streets of New York City, and rode across America’s Midwest.
On the journey he met an unlikely lifelong friend and an even more unlikely love of his life. He joined a community of farmers who became his family as they endured the hardships of homesteading in Kansas. When the Grasshopper Plague of 1874 destroyed his community’s crops and put the future of all their farms in jeopardy, he needed to find a way to save his community and his own farm from ruin.
Each experience made him the man he became.
I’m amazed to think my own journey with Joseph began because I thought I saw a woman standing at a gravesite.