Travel Ban

Find me and my novels here...

 Life in the time of pandemic has changed.  With children and grandchild living on another coast, my biggest challenge has been not being able to travel to see them.  

                                missing this little California fellow!

My husband and I share a love of travel, of seeing the world from a new perspective, learning about  new cultures, people, history. Here in Vermont we share a border with Canada and have beloved cousins there. No go, though only a few hours from the border! Our European dreams have been feasting on Rick Steves’ travelogues through beautiful counties on the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and along the Arno, Rhine, Danube. We now count on documentaries with drone flights across jungle claimed lost cities and imaginatively drained oceans in search of ancient cultures and shipwrecks.

                         guiding art lovers along trails that painter Thomas Cole hiked

Once upon a time, we conducted art tours through the mountains loved by the Hudson River School artists. Now we head to remote state parks and find beaches too crowded for us to get out of the car.

                                           The Piddocks have a lovely spot

Lately we’ve found a cure for our wanderlust...we've been taking walks through local graveyards and cemeteries, in search of lives that genealogists are trying to track down. You can find lists of such requests on FindaGrave.com.  Claim them to start your search. The oldest gravestones in our area are in church yards. We have seen some beautiful stone carvings from early America and our Federal period.  And the names! Sometimes the stones even the stories of lives well-lived or cut short by childbirth, disease, sudden violence. 

                                         The Ellis grave includes their wedding date...

Later in the the 19th century cemeteries were established in garden-like settings, for picnic visits with deceased loved ones. We found ourselves talking to the people on our lists, scraping away lichen from their stones to make out their dates. We were rarely in the company of the living except for an occasional groundskeeper or romping dog.  Ah, socially distanced mask freedom!

                                           keeping watch over fallen comrades

When we return home, I go on FindaGrave.com and log in our images of discoveries. 

A pleasant surprise? Within hours, my email inbox is usually full of messages from far-flung relatives with profound thanks.  

We recommend grave hunting to everyone.

Cemetery: spooky or fascinating? by J.S. Marlo

J. S. Marlo BWL Author Page

Call me weird, but I love visiting cemeteries where people have been buried—unburied and reburied—for centuries. Day or night, graveyards are quiet and peaceful, but I'll admit I've never ventured in one in the middle of the night alone. I might find it spooky...

While I was in Paris, I made a point for visiting the catacombs with my daughter. It was eerie to see the skeletons neatly stacks into a solid wall so they wouldn’t tumble. Some of these bones or skulls were three or four hundred years old. Though I write romantic suspense (there are a fair amount of dead people and old bones in my stories) I've never googled how long it took for bones to decompose. Maybe I should have, because I would have guessed way less than four hundred years.

While seeing bones and skulls is interesting, I’m most fascinated with grave markers and the inscriptions on them. There are a lot to learn from the names, descriptions, and dates.

During a three-day vacation in Iceland, hubby and I rented a car and toured the island. In the countryside, we stumbled onto an old church dating back to the middle ages. Behind it was a small cemetery. Graves were marked with wooden crosses or headstones. The oldest grave dated back to the 11^th century while the most recent burial had occurred in my lifetime. I was amazed that most of the inscriptions had weathered the centuries. It was interesting to see how some names change through time (an "S" that disappears, or a "D" that becomes a "T"), and to travel from one generation to the next and discover the family connections between the dead. Some had died young while others had lived to see their seventieth or eightieth birthday. To be honest, I was surprised to see so many of them reach an advanced age during the 12th or 13th century.

The early markings on the gravestones behind that little Icelandic church fascinated me, especially the ones dating back to the middle ages. I have seen many ways to write dates, but  that was my first encounter with this specific form. I wish I had taken a picture, but the battery on my phone was dead. I wrote an example of the markings on a piece of paper (see photo).  In that example, the person would have been born on April 17, 1263 and would have died on October 30, 1318.

My current story "Misguided Honor", which I'm hoping to finish by Christmas, revolves around an unusual  graveyard near Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia.  I've lived near Annapolis Royal for three years and my second daughter was born there. Back then, I was too busy raising my young children to spend time in graveyards. If only I'd known then what I know now...

Last year my hubby built my family tree. My ancestors arrived in Canada in the early 1600s. In my youth I'd heard stories about some of the males marrying native women, so I wasn't surprised to learn I indeed possess native blood, though it's very diluted after thirteen generations. What I didn't expect was to learn that a big branch on my father side settled in Annapolis Royal in the mid 1600s then fled to Quebec in the mid 1700s to avoid the great deportation. I had no idea that many of my ancestors were Acadians. These first settlers from whom I descend are probably buried in Annapolis Royal cemetery—a few streets from the hospital where my daughter was born more then two hundred and fifty years later.

I wish I had known when I lived in Annapolis Royal that I had come full circle. Now I long for a chance to walk into that cemetery. Maybe one day...

JS

 J. S. Marlo's Website