| Our Cemetery Blog |
| October 18, 2003 Finding the graves of the veterans, our cemetery trips, can be quite an adventure. We are learning about what to do and what not to do and by keeping this blog, I hope we can add some humor to the site, and help others. We started visiting cemeteries last spring to learn more about the history of our County - Crawford County, Wisconsin. Randy has always been interested in the Civil War, and was appalled to see the condition of some of the veteran's gravestones. We started recording the information on the gravestones. Then we started this website. Now, we visit cemeteries whenever we can and record the veteran's names and grave locations on our website. Today we had to go to the car dealership in Richland County, Wisconsin. I need a new car, and we were looking at PT Cruisers. We use Randy's Jeep for most of our cemetery trips. Anyway, when the salesman took us out for a test drive, we spotted three cemeteries that we hadn't recorded yet!! And the rest of our morning was spent visiting cemeteries in Richland County. We hadn't really planned to do that this morning, but we found veterans from some out of state regiments that we hadn't recorded yet. Tomorrow, we have a trip planned to Juneau and Adams Counties. Last night I searched the web, and have a list of cemeteries in those counties - along with directions to many of them. We also have a map of Wisconsin counties with cemetery locations marked. We have learned to be prepared with cemetery locations before we get in the Jeep. Last month we drove to Dubuque, Iowa for a weekend trip. We didn't know where the cemeteries in Dubuque County were, and had to drive around looking for them. We spent more time looking for the cemeteries than looking at the graves. We stopped at a bookstore to buy a map of Dubuque County, Iowa - one that had cemetery locations marked - couldn't find one. We will return to Dubuque County in the Spring armed with cemetery locations culled from the web. |
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| December 20, 2003 It's been some time since I've written, but we have been active. November - I was in Florida vacationing near Ft. Myers. I visited a couple cemeteries, but they were both too new for Civil War Veterans. December - We've been keeping warm inside, but decided to venture out to a cemetery today. We drove to Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison, Wisconsin. It was FREEZING outside. The ink in our pens kept freezing!! But we persevered and found a "CSA Lot" where Confederate veterans who had been held at Camp Randall were buried. What a great addition! Until today, we had found only one Confederate veteran. |