ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s Memorial Day weekend.

Begun as a holiday to remember the sacrifices of Civil War soldiers, it’s morphed into the unofficial start of summer and a time to remember soldiers of all wars.

And in less strict terms, I’ve always looked at as an opportunity to memorialize all those who have died.

What are my plans for the weekend?

This year, they’ll include getting ready for the National Genealogical Society conference in Richmond, Virginia (being held from May 31 to June 3), since I’ll be leaving for it not long into the week.

In previous years, my agenda is almost always involved cemetery visits.

As a child I would visit those cemeteries with my mother and paternal grandmother, usually delivering coffee-cans wrapped in red-and-blue foil containing peonies that had just bloomed.

We’d go to the Bern Cemetery Company’s Historic Graveyard, where so many of my mother Mildred Hiester Beidler’s people were buried. And in addition to decorating graves, we’d usually take a hike up the steep hillside of that burial ground (Gosh, I wish I remember the last time my mother was able to take that trip … you truly don’t miss things until they’re gone, right?).

My paternal grandmother Dora Etchberger Beidler would visit the St. John’s (Host) Church cemetery for her husband and three of her sons’ graves (only my dad outlived her). Gosh, I wish I had started genealogy when she was alive since there were so many more ancestors she had buried at Host Church than she even knew!

We’d also visit the cemetery at Salem Reformed Church, Bethel, since three generations of her Etchberger ancestors were buried there, including her great-grandparents Franklin Etchberger and Elizabeth Schneider, who lived into their 80s and were remembered by my grandmother.

In the last couple of decades, visited the flat stone marker of Stephan Brecht, the furthest back ancestor for whom there is an intact tombstone (he died in 1747). He was the second burial in the North Heidelberg Moravian Church’s cemetery.

During one of the pandemic Memorial Days, I found that a church just a few miles away from me had the brown sandstone marker for my ancestor Christian Albrecht.

And literally even closer to my own backyard, in that same Bern historic graveyard in which I’ve prowled around since my youth, I was guided by others’ efforts to make the connection to a new fifth-great-grandmother Anna Margaretha Gräter Lieb Staudt.

As I’ve written about previously, finally having the German phonetic skills to understand that the maiden name spelled as Chräder on her tombstone was equivalent to Gräter is a small but significant lifetime achievement.

And, yes, I’ll probably have some grilled food, likely a hamburger (maybe a “California hamburger” with a multitude of fixings like my mother used to enjoy) and a hot dog or two (cue the spicy brown mustard!).

No matter your own traditions—hoping you all have a good holiday!