CARVED IN STONE

 

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

 Count me among the millions of fans of PBS’s “Finding Your Roots,” a show based on unearthing the genealogy of celebrity guests. While its host, Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. states that he is on a quest to “get into the DNA of American culture,” the mission statement of the program commits overall to satisfying our “basic drive to discover who we are and where we come from.”

On a spring day of 2019 my sister Sherri and I, along with our cousins Freda and Lisa, went in search of what we could discover of our roots as scribed on gravestones of the dearly departed of our shared bloodline. We visited four or five cemeteries peppered around our southern Ohio ancestral stomping grounds. Our great grandparents, great great grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins two and three times removed, their names and dates of birth and death on narrow slabs of stone as testament to their time on earth, were all that was left to recommend them to posterity. Hints to their experiences were indicated in dates spanning the American Civil War, the First World War, the 1918 flu pandemic, and other bracketed historical eras. At the end of the day, the four of us came away gladdened by the number of gravesites we found, but I for one was also saddened by the knowledge that I would likely never know anything more about my ancestral histories buried there. An old African proverb states that when a man dies, a library dies with him. The strength of that truism sweeps over me whenever I visit a cemetery and no more so than on that particular day.

            While doctors, clergy, educators and other professional sorts were scattered among my paternal ancestors several generations back, in the main, my mother’s people were simple, dirt-poor, country folk: farmers, laborers, and other blue-collar types. It is a good bet that like all marginalized people everywhere throughout time that a sizable number of them were the foot soldiers in the American Civil War, the infantry in the First World War, the hospital aides during the 1918 flu pandemic…the “essential workers” in Covid-19 terminology. However, I know firsthand of the hardships and sacrifices, as well as the good times that defined the lives of my kin during the Great Depression and World War II. It is a strong theme of GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, my novel of historical fiction based on the true story of three generations of my family made ever more profound by the inclusion of transcriptions of actual letters they wrote to one another. One reviewer said of it, “This book reminded me of discovering an old chest in an attic, filled with the treasured pieces of a family's history. The walk through the years through the old letters between family members was like meeting old friends for the first time…”©

                                                                            

 

Purchase Link to GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS: http://goo.gl/imUwKO.