High View Cemetery and my mother’s birthday

Today would have been my mother’s 80th birthday, and it seems fitting that I start my family history blog with one of my most cherished memories of her.

Several years ago I went for a drive with my parents and brother and ended up in Ione, Oregon, where my mother grew up. We drove to the cemetery to ‘visit’ her parents, grandparents, siblings, and countless aunts, uncles, and cousins. Most of them were gone before I was born, and I have sketchy memories, if any, of the ones who weren’t.

At that point in my life I viewed genealogy as nothing more than an exercise in filling in names and dates on a chart; I didn’t think dead people who lived ordinary and unremarkable lives were particularly interesting. An hour later, I looked at the world in a completely different way.

As we walked through the cemetery, my mother introduced me to her family:

“This is my grandfather. He played fiddle at all the local dances.” (Charles Henry Botts, 1873-1944)

“This is my aunt Mary Ann. They ruled her death a suicide, but the family never believed it.” (Mary Ann Botts Griffin, 1896-1951)

“This is my brother Mike. He was killed in a motorcycle crash, but I think he knew he was going to die.” Delbert Botts, (1928-1954)

“This is my cousin Doogie. ‘Car accident.’ I’d love to know what really happened there.” (Charles Dugan (1937-1959)

And on it went.

Everybody has a story, and there is something remarkable in even the most ordinary lives. That walk with my mother is where my interest in genealogy started, and it made me want to collect (and share) as many of these remarkable stories as I can.

All families have myths and each myth seems to have, for lack of a better explanation, an elasticity factor. There is some semblance of truth to many of them–by all accounts, great-aunt Mary Ann had a volatile marriage, and it’s not much of a stretch to believe that she died in a drunken family brawl and not as the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Other stories are stretched to the limit, and an illegitimate child becomes the offspring of a famous movie star, or a simple car accident becomes a conspiracy.

Most family histories – mine included – are filled with people who were not notable. Most of us don’t have an Einstein or a Rockefeller. We have a lot of ordinary people who lived ordinary lives, and the myths we share make them bigger than the lives they led. I love the “big” stories; they always leave me wondering why this is the story that the family has chosen to remember about a specific person. But I love the “ordinary” stories as well, because they are the ones that represent who we are and where we came from.

There are 620 graves in High View Cemetery, more than twice the number of living people in Ione. And I have people in a lot of cemeteries across the country. That’s a lot of stories.