Some might say the “holy grail” of genealogy is putting aside all that paper research and gumshoeing and spitting into a tube, sealing it up, and mailing it off to the Mormons for verification in their ever-expanding database of lives lived, down to the DNA. But that just doesn’t get my socks going up and down. It’s a trick of chemistry that, to me, makes blood, somehow, impersonal.
I’ve skipped the saliva-gram altogether, and found my own grails to pursue.
Every spring, the flowering shrub planted — or having taken root — at Michael Pfouts’s gravesite swallows his memorial stone, and each autumn, it shrivels to reveal the stone again. Picture from March 2011. This was one of my most unique genealogy finds — I first visited the cemetery south of Bowerston, Ohio, in Spring and couldn’t find Michael’s stone due to the flowering plant. When I came back at the tail end of winter, there was the resting place of our oldest Foutz ancestor, first to come to the United States from Germany.
What (Still) Captivates Me About Genealogy
Howdy, all, after a good long while. And happy 2020.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Whispering Across the Campfire. And though a kind of yawning chasm has tended to open up between my posts, especially of late, this year I’ve resolved to open up the archives and spill…
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