If anyone in the family happens to travel to Stanardsville, we could use some photos of the Lawson cemetery. I have found none in the national cemetery web pages. Our family has a special inheritance, unusual within the panorama of American history: not the least of which is the hauntingly beautiful antebellum Lawson cemetery with its breathtaking views of the mountains, and the authentic homestead nearby---all of which could be altered or disappear entirely within the next generation.
In her last days, the early days of the new millennium, Grandma Carrie wanted above all to join her bones to those of her mother, her people, her land, Virginia, at the foot of the ancient blue ridge of mountains. Having been there, having listened to her stories, I can see why. A centenarian, she had the length and breadth of vision that few can achieve, the wisdom of over a century, and a very gentle and loving heart.
Grandma wanted very much to preserve and pass on her heritage to whomever would take the time and interest to listen and to take action. Confined by her circumstances in life, and later by economics and the limitations of her body, her mind was still active and seeking, always reaching, to pass on what she learned, what she experienced, and what she dreamed, so that others, her children and her children's children, could benefit. So, she told us, her children who would take the time to listen, what she knew. It is up to us to pass her hopeful torch and keep its light burning however we can. Here is a small beginning.
Thanks to our cousins the Shifletts of Virginia, I have learned what can be done to capture, preserve, and perpetuate the vitality and special character of our family. This is not the only way to accomplish this; but it is a start.
I beg you to take the time to capture a memory or observation about our family. Feel free to take the reins and blaze your own trails: so many branches of our family tree can be explored. And hey kids, Harry Potter was doing this very same thing! Some day, your children will thank you. In small ways we make history.
Grandma's chickens: she had a big yard along the creek. there was a two-story barn reserved for the chickens. When we stayed with her for a week or two during the summers we were sent up to the chicken house to 'fetch' eggs. These were then fried up in a cast-iron skillet, with bacon from Grandaddy Beddow's hogs and maybe a pan of fried apples and some fresh biscuits. I have never tasted eggs or apples like those. Has food lost some of its taste with modern production methods? seems so....
ReplyDeleteGrandaddy Beddow kept a pen of beagle hunting dogs in the back yard of their home on Todd Avenue. He would go out some to hunt with these dogs. I would like to know more about those trips; where did he go? what did he hunt? The world of men, Grandad---and B--- and Purvis who slept upstairs in the unheated attic of the house, was a strange and unfathomable world to me. I much preferred the pink cabbage roses on the wallpapered walls downstairs and the warm kitchen at the heart of the house with its delicious smells and the kitty-cat clock with rolling eyes and tick-tock wagging tail.
ReplyDeleteGrandma didn't drive. I remember walking up Todd Avenue with her to catch a bus to town for shopping. When they lived at Yancey's Mill, way out in the country, one really bad winter, she was stranded alone at home all day in that lonely valley, snowed in, with nothing but a radio to keep her company. She said that was one of the worst years of her life....
ReplyDeleteGrandad's pigs-
ReplyDeleteGrandad's cows, and milking time-
Mama M-- tells of Sundays with family: picnics and swimming on the Fluvanna (?) river.
To this day we have questions about the unnameable illness that apparently came through the Deane family.(?) Mama Bett (?) was bed-ridden for the last years of her life with a MS or MD type of disease that is passed down through the genes. One branch of our family in particular inherited the recessive gene from both maternal and paternal side resulting in multiple members of the same family (four out of five children) getting the terrible affliction, onset in the twenties, usually in the males.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at our family tree you can see that there has been lots of intermarriage over the last two centuries: Coleman, Deane, Beddow, Breeden, Lawson, to name but a few.
Comments? This terrible affliction can now be identified and avoided, if not treated or cured, by making information available about our family tree.