I am going on vacation soon, but you, dear readers of my blog will never know it. You won’t know when I leave home or when I get back. We live in quite the technologically modern age. I can co-ordinate behind the scenes to make sure the blog continues to post while I am gone. For the last few weeks I have been doubling up on my scanning and transcribing duties. Instead of doing a letter a day, I’ve been doing two, three or even four.  On some days, I forget that I have already read ahead and my readers have not. The most important part of the process is the scanning. As long as I get the letters scanned and online, I can do everything else from the road. While I am gone, I will be able to continue to text and call family. It makes me think how much easier it might have been for my grandparents during World War II, but then we wouldn’t have their wonderful letters to read.

My children have never been to where I grew up. I have wanted to show them the east coast for awhile (plus there are old friends I haven’t seen in ages). We live in the town where their father grew up. They know where he went to school and they have seen the various places from his childhood. This summer we will walk upon the matrilineal ancestral grounds. Through an interesting quirk of fate, my mother was the first generation on her mother’s side NOT to have been born in Massachusetts in over 300 years (at the time of her birth). Luckily for me, she returned to Massachusetts where I was born. The earliest known female in my direct matrilineal line was a woman named Susannah Leach. She was born in Massachusetts in 1703. I have yet to discover her parentage. In 1720, at the age of 17 years, she married Isaac Churchill. They had 7 children. Susannah died at the grand age of 87 in 1790. Both Leach and Churchill are surnames that crisscross my maternal family tree through several generations.

Since we also descend from several pilgrim families one of our destinations is Plymouth, Massachusetts to  explore Plimouth Plantation and the Mayflower II. I have seriously tried to limit the urge to drag my children through endless cemeteries. BUT this morning on the ride to school I asked my daughter if she would be willing to go to a cemetery or two. She begrudgingly agreed. She is not so thrilled with the residents of the animal kingdom that we come across in graveyards, i.e. spiders and the occasional grass snake. Last night, it popped into my head that I should try finding the grave of Marcia Leach (who is possibly related to Susannah but I don’t know how). When Marcia was born, her family lived in Plymouth. As a young girl, the entire family moved to Lynn, presumably for the job opportunities the factory town provided. After Marcia’s brief marriage that produced my great, great grandfather, Marcia and her sister Lizzie lived together for the remainder of Marcia’s life in Lynn.

I am not sure what happened to Lizzie after Marcia’s death in 1911. Several of their siblings are buried at the Pine Grove Cemetery in Lynn, Massachusetts. However, on the death records for Marcia and her parents, even though their deaths occurred in Lynn, burial was given as Plymouth with no cemetery listed. NO CEMETERY LISTED!!! Do you know how many burials there are in the second oldest European settlement in our country? Talk about the proverbial needle in a haystack. To make matters worse, Plymouth has all their known burials online. And guess what? Nothing. Marcia and Lizzie’s brother Robert died in 1902. His death record even gives a cemetery in Plymouth, Vine Hills. Again, nothing. The only Robert Leach buried in Plymouth is their uncle Robert Bartlett Leach. I even resorted to calling the Cemetery Department this morning to see if they could help. Let me just tell you how much I abhor talking on the telephone. It was a big deal for me to make that call. The clerk who assisted me was very kind but she wasn’t able to shed any light on the matter. She even looked at the old cemetery cards for Vine Hills. So at this point, I may just have to come to grips with the fact that I may never find Marcia’s grave. I suspect that this family may not have been well off and may not have been able to afford a plot or cemetery stones. My last resort is to contact the cemetery in Lynn and see if she is buried there, despite the notation that her burial was in Plymouth.

And now that I have taken the time to rant about my genealogical brick wall for the day, I must get back to transcribing those letters. I don’t want you to miss out while I am away.