Coming up for Air

I felt changed when I discovered that some of my forefathers are buried in the "Reed Graveyard" along a river in Rowan County, the Old Yadkin river, just a couple hours drive from Wake County.

Just the discovery changed me, changed the temperature of the water, the feel of the wind, my sense of what's real. Like when a strange compelling light filters through clouds and is so stunning you have to stop and take a breath.

I am walking a short stone wall, balancing between falling and falling, teetering: Is it significant that some of my hundreds of known predecessors are buried in North Carolina where I now live? Or is it not significant because at 6 generations back there are at least 64 parents / grands and greats? What kind of significance is there?

I did the math, forefathers double each generation. See for yourself. At the 4th generation there are 16 foreparents, at the 6th generation there are 64 foreparents. That's a lot, how important could any one couple among them be?

1G - 2      Parents
2G - 4     Grandparents
3G - 8     Great Grandparents
4G - 16   2x Great Grandparents
5G - 32   3x Great Grandparents
6G - 64   4x Great Grandparents
7G - 128 5x Great Grandparents
8G - 256 6x Great Grandparents
9G - 512 7x Great Grandparents
10G - 1024 8x Great Grandparents
11G - 2048 9x
12G - 4096 10x
13G - 8192 11x

The math would seem to lean towards a lack of signficance. After all finding two of my many dozens of foreparents in NC is just two in a collection of hundreds, thousands.

Maybe it's finding out that some of this Northerner's roots are in the South, though their story is that they left New Jersey due to a real estate swindle. The story is fascinating, if disturbing.

Or maybe it's the experience of driving through the centuries to a place where family and friends would have gathered to bid their farewell. If loved, everyone would feel so very sad. Hopefully they were loved.

Finding the graveyard down a riverside road, and a small road off that, almost a driveway, to the river's edge where, protected by a chain link fence, a crooked entrance, and not a sign with a name and statement, lay a motley collection of stones in all kids of repair and disrepair. A couple or so have had new granite gravestones placed near the collapsed grave.

One car parked next to the river, perhaps someone went fishing; another parked in the large lot next to the graveyard, so I wasn't alone in this otherwise somewhat remote site. Still I was wary, as I always need to be as a woman. I stepped through the whole small cemetery. Maybe a quarter of an acre in size. Under a dozen or more old trees. Camera in hand looking for the names that had arisen in my myheritage.com family tree, I sought every stone, and took photos of every one that had any sign of lettering, poured water over the stones whose carved letters were all but eroded, hoping that the letters might be clearer.

I saw some names I recognized, the gravestones that showed the generation whose name was spelled REID instead of REED.

I felt sobered stepping on land my mother's mother's forefathers had gathered on time and again as they returned their loved ones to the ground.

That was the graveyard visit.

The Registrar of Deeds visit in nearby city of Salisbury was also stunning, surreal. I opened these huge books, books the size of ten text books, and saw signatures written centuries ago, to registrar land purchases. Grants were listed, too. From that book we are given numbers that make it possible to look up the details on a computer database, to see copies of the actual documents, their handwriting, from as far back as the 1700s, maybe even earlier.

It is stunning for me. I feel a shock in making even this bare minimum contact with times and lives gone by; as if reaching through the veil of time by touching the paper and stones that my forefathers touched.

That's what I have for now.

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Edits are ongoing.