Half of my ancestry is from a very rural county in the Appalachian Mountains in western Virginia. They got to Virginia well before the Revolution, after landing in Philadelphia in the 1730s. They turned
left at the Great Valley, which runs southeasterly from Pennsylvania through Virginia and on into Carolina and Tennessee. They were Germans who intermarried with the Scotch Irish and about 1788 arrived in Bath County, Virginia, where I still have plenty of cousins, and lots of them are buried there.

The first one was named Jacob, born in Germany in 1725 and one of four brothers. Their father died on board ship on the way over and was buried at sea with no grave but the rolling waves of some portion of the Atlantic.

Jacob and his mother and brothers survived and apparently did well. It’s not clear if the mother remarried or was a member of a congregation that migrated together. Jacob married and settled in Virginia, then moved to Bath County. He lived to what was a very ripe old age, lasting to 1813.
I don’t know if his is the first grave there. His grave is decorated with the wording “Fought in the French and Indian War,” or at least it once was, I have not been back for many years.

The graveyard is named after Jacob and has several hundred occupants at this point, a jumble of ancestors and cousins many times removed and whose names I do not recognize. My parents and one set of grandparents and two sets of great grandparents and so on, back to Jacob and his wife Christina rest there. The place is on a sloping hillside, with a mountain spur behind it and a river down below.

It’s not particularly beautiful, but it’s a calm place to await eternity, and on most summer days the tombstones share the place with crickets and birds in the day and foxes and deer in the summer nights. In the winter, the graves share the snow and the cold. Now and then someone will mow the weeds and wildflowers, but the weeds may be more appropriate in their lusty extravagance, drawing bees and meadow mice.

When I discovered you can view most places in the US via Google maps, I was curious to see the place. The place is so rural that there is no specific address and I have no idea of the geographical coordinates. I find the small church nearby, Starr Chapel, and follow the road north and do a left turn at
the graveyard entrance. The view is kind of abstract, but when you switch to the terrain, you can see the rows of graves, and how some gravestones remain standing and some tilted. It reminds me of looking at maps of
Stonehenge in a bird’s eye view, it seems incredibly ancient.

Looking at the ragged lines of graves, all the same distance apart, has for me a kind of archaeological feel, and yet several dozen of those graves are
my direct ancestors and others hold uncles and aunts and cousins I vaguely remember. At one point there were actually gravediggers with shovels, and the tradition was for someone to leave them with a bottle of good whisky. There wasn’t the tender and the neat descent into the grave typical of recent funerals. The crowd left and the undertaker finished things up.

Last time I was there the gravediggers used a backhoe and must have had to bring it in by truck, the undertaker’s place is 30 miles away.

It’s an odd feeling, using Google map’s bird’s eye view from overhead. In my head, it blendfamily and ancient history, with the mental image of Stonehenge blending with the view. The graveyard cradles 200 years of my ancestors. All of them, as far as I can tell, are buried feet facing the east, the direction of the sunrise. In Christian tradition, that’s the direction that the Resurrection will come from, with the dead rising from their graves facing the correct direction. If that ever comes, it should be quite
the family reunion.

I don’t know if I’ll be there. A beloved uncle and a cousin I once shared summers with were cremated, and their ashes sprinkled in the river down below the graveyard, from an old swinging bridge where the water riffles and spurts and makes a comforting river murmur. I might do that, although
there’s a place reserved for me in the graveyard. I think I might prefer the river murmuring to the wind in the wildflowers.

Whatever, our time here is limited and the time before us was infinite and the time after us, we will have to wait and see. My hope is to arrive at the pearly gates and wait for my sweetie to arrive, and then we’ll hold hands and dance, and I bet St. Peter has a good dance band.

Deep knowledge, every day.
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