Week 5: In the kitchen

Sometimes when you are doing family research, you end up eating raspberry pie from an Amish kitchen in a cemetery almost 90 miles from home!

I had been wanting to visit the cemetery where my dad’s grandparents and aunts and uncles were buried in Tustin, MI for some time. So in the summer of 2015 I contacted my dad’s cousin, Garth, to see if he could meet us there as he knew where the graves were located. In passing I asked him if he had any old family photographs he could bring. You see I am actually related to both Garth and his wife Corlene, Garth being my 1st cousin, 1x removed, and Corlene being my 2nd cousin, 1x removed.

When my two sisters and I arrived at the cemetery that beautiful summer day, Garth and Corlene were already there and had set up a card table and chairs near his parents’ grave. And in their van were boxes and boxes of photo albums! What a treasure! We spent over two hours looking through photographs and taking pictures before driving around the cemetery and finding graves of great grandparents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles.

Garth’s mother had passed away a year and a half earlier and they were in the process of selling her house. His father and mother married in Tustin in 1935 and his father had been gone for over 30 years. Garth was raised in the house and I had visited it many times over the years as a child and then in later years when I would take my dad to visit Garth’s mom before he passed away in 2008. So today Garth asked if we would like to see the house one more time before the sale was final. An Amish family was in the process of buying it and the sale would be complete in just a few weeks.

We drove the few miles over to the house, and the new owners were working in the yard. The husband and wife and their two daughters were Amish and they were joining many other Amish families who had recently settled in the area. Garth and Corlene gave us a quick tour of the house, and when we were ready to leave the wife gave us a homemade raspberry pie to take with us along with paper plates and forks. We headed back to the cemetery and sat at the card table under the trees by Garth’s parents’ grave and ate a slice of that delicious pie from the Amish kitchen!

We were able to locate many graves that day and view so many amazing new photographs. But you never know when you are doing family research when you’ll be surprised with such a wonderful treat!

Just a couple new photographs (left) My 2nd great grandfather John Nelson who came to Michigan in the 1870s and his daughter Matilda. (right) My great grandfather Peter Holmquist who married John Nelson’s oldest daughter Hanna.