Although we loved visiting with friends and exploring the rivers in Florida, after wintering there for two straight years, we were elated to finally be heading elsewhere. Jay spent time in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula early in his Coast Guard career and thought it would be a wonderful place for Chris to photograph. Chris reasoned that if they were going that far north for the summer they might as well stop by St. Paul, Minnesota where her grandfather and other relatives used to live and take photos of family items held at the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS). She gathered together genealogy papers of her family to read through during the long, multi-day drive in preparation for visiting the MHS so that she would know what items to request and photograph for the family records. Little did she know what was in store for her.
At a small family reunion a couple of years earlier her cousin, Laura, had compiled a notebook for each attendee that contained pages of photos and other family information. Chris decided to read its contents, while Jay drove, and found photos that she recognized from her childhood of her great, great and great, great, great grandparents. Laura had copied the photos on separate pages along with the information about who they were, when the photos were taken and where they lived and died underneath each photo. It was fortunate for Chris that Jay had upgraded his cell phone to a new Blackberry with internet browsing capability just a week before, as she immediately started searching the web for the locations of the Illinois towns listed for their births and deaths. The first day of their drive, Chris discovered the name of the cemetery where the relatives in the photo were buried was west of Chicago, a city they would pass on their way to St. Paul. The decision was made to drive longer days so that they would arrive in the Chicago area soon enough to visit the Garfield Cemetery in Wasco, IL.
We passed many fields full of these gorgeous yellow flowers while passing through Indiana.
After two days of ten plus hour drives they arrived at a Wal-Mart south of Chicago, bumped out the slides and crashed. The next morning they followed the route, via the Google Map on Jay’s Blackberry, to Wasco in search of the cemetery. As they neared the location Chris saw headstones atop a hill in the distance and squealed with excitement. The anticipation of the find mounted as they made the final turn up a gravel road and ascended the hill. At the top they found the Garfield Farm on the right and the immaculately kept Garfield Cemetery to the left, the drive flanked by two, concrete capped brick pillars. Since the farm appeared to be of a historic nature, Chris and Jay approached the door to what appeared to be an office. Two staff ushered them inside and, after a brief conversation as to why they were there, they produced a small notebook listing the graves and their locations. While flipping the pages searching for the Clark relatives, Chris also noticed the name Shaw, the maiden name of her great, great grandmother, Rhoda Shaw. She’d struck gold. Not only were her great, great grandparents, Charles Asa and Rhoda Shaw Clark buried there, but Rhoda’s parents and siblings as well!
The Garfield Farm was owned by relatives of James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States.
A donation for the farm and many gracious thanks was left with the most helpful staff then Chris and Jay practically ran across the street to locate the graves from the map they were given of the grounds. In no time they’d found them in the first few rows of headstones. There they were. She envisioned their faces that had peered at her from photographs over one hundred years old when, as a child, she found them in a chest drawer, at the time marveling at the age of the photos and the information typed on the back which made the ancestral connection from them to her. Tears of joy and sorrow welled up as she felt the magnitude of her discovery. Tears of joy at finding them and the contribution she could then make to the family tree that others had been working on for years, and sorrow for not knowing anything more about them than their names and where they were buried. She silently vowed to search for more information and immediately called her cousins, who had more actively pursued their family’s history, to share the discovery.
The photos that started it all:
Jesse and Delight Shaw, Chris’ great, great, great grandparents.
Asa and Rhoda Clark, Chris’ great, great grandparents.
Chris presumed the Shaw family was one of note in the community as there was a huge tombstone engraved with only the name Shaw. Smaller headstones of Jesse and Delight Swan Shaw, Chris’ great, great, great grandparents were close by along with five other Shaw relatives, whose connections to the family she had yet to discover.
The Shaw family plot at Garfield Cemetery.
She took lots of photos of the entire plot and individual headstones as well as views of the surrounding area while Jay walked the grounds searching for other familiar names on headstones like Burr and Wheeler. While in the farmhouse, the staff told us of the connection of the Garfield family to the family of the Revolutionary war hero and Vice-President, Aaron Burr and we also noted a 19th century photo of an older woman with the middle name of Wheeler, a name with which Chris was familiar in another line of her family. She pondered the possible connections and mentally filed the information away for further study.
Friends of Jay’s from his cruising days, Barry and Diane Wallace live in the Chicago area. Jay had not seen them for over 10 years and we’d made arrangements to meet Barry for lunch (Diane was detained and couldn’t make it). Chris reluctantly got into the truck cab for the trip to meet him but wished she had a few days to remain in the area and research property, birth and death records for more information about the relations she was leaving behind. She was hopeful that what she might find in St. Paul would shed more light on their lives.
Chris had never met Barry but had always heard so much from Jay about him and his family from the days when they chartered his boat in the Virgin Islands. We had a wonderful lunch, each of us telling all kinds of stories that spanned the years gone by. Then it was back on the road to a nearby campground before heading out in the morning for the last leg of our journey to St. Paul.
Jay and Barry outside the restaurant where we had lunch.
Barry took this photo of us as we pulled into the restaurant parking lot.
If you’ve ever flown across this great nation of ours, you know that it is about 3,000 miles wide and it takes about 7-9 hours in a jet to span its breadth. Driving it is something else. You really gain an understanding of how vast and beautiful it is. Interstates are not our routes of choice but at least they are reasonably fast and get us from point A to point B. The point of all this is the last leg of the journey from Illinois to St. Paul, MN was still one heck of a haul at over 360 miles. It was an eight hour drive, with frequent pit stops to stretch our legs, before we arrived at a beautiful, privately owned RV park about 10 miles east of the city. After a grueling day on the road, it is the most wonderful feeling to pull into a quiet, well-maintained, secluded, RV park with colorful blossoms gushing from planters and be greeted by smiling faces whose owners truly make you feel that they are glad to see you. Thus we arrived at St. Paul, home to Chris’ maternal Clark family line, on Sunday, May 16th.
A welcome sight after a long day on the road.
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