13 Jul 2011
Ancestral Post Offices
I haven't done much non-bee blogging here yet, but my roadtrip this summer seems like a great place to start. I'm driving around out west with my friend Mike this month, visiting people and national parks and exploring a good double-handful of states I've never visited before.
Before road-tripping officially began, though, Dave and I flew into Kansas City on July 5th to visit his great-godmother Marge Webb and my cousin Jen and her family.
Marge took us on a tour of her family's part of Missouri. We saw my favorite kind of hay - marshmallow-shaped bales of it, all in a row!
We saw Marge's ancestral barn.
It actually gave me flashbacks to our trip to Thailand a few years ago!
Can't you imagine Dave as a farm boy?
He headed back to Portland for work a few days ago, and I miss him terribly already.
Marge was a delightful host and a pleasure to visit. She's truly one of the most charming, interesting, and kind people I've ever known.
Here she is, with her ancestral barn.
She showed us her family cemetery, in Miller community, Missouri, in the midst of her acres and acres of farmland. She's picked out her plot already.
"If you decide on the Midwest as your burying place," she told us, "there's space here for you, too!"
We learned that all our families have ancestral post offices. Marge has a building that's still being rented out by a post office now. My grandmother's old house in Hungary was turned into a post office after she was forced to flee the country.
And apparently Dave's family has some historical connection to Turner Station, with its mercantile shop and its post office.
Dave went into the store at Turner Station to inquire about his family history. I was skeptical, but of course it turned out that they had a big book of Turner genealogy lying around to show him. He couldn't find his great-grandparents' names in it, but he saw some name he recognized.
So, it's still a bit hazy on whether there's a real connection there or not. But still.
Does everyone have an ancestral post office? Is this a thing? Before there were taxes and death and stew, there were post offices in the muck.
On July 8th, we flew off to Portland, Oregon. More photos to follow next time I get some decent internet along the road!