I Love Memorial Day Weekend! I LOVE visiting cemeteries and remembering loved ones. Lucky is the family surrounded by loved ones on both sides of the veil separating us from heaven. Here are the sacred spots we visited this year, starting with the Lehi City Cemetery:
Peaceful and green, decorated and lovely, Lehi Cemetery is where I go to visit loved ones. In addition to Martin and Elizabeth Degen Bushman’s graves shown in my last post, I also visited dozens of other family members.
These headstones below memorialize children of Charlotte and Jacob Bushman: Frances Ann b. 17 April 1866, d. 26 Jan 1874 and Mary Emma b. 5 Oct 1871, d. 2 Jan 1872. Charlotte had 10 children. Three of them died as children. What a heartbreaking thing!
Many family members lost children, sometimes one after the next. Here are 4 of 7 children lost for now by father, Martin Benjamin Bushman, Jacob’s brother: John Benjamin, Alva Alonzo, Sarah, (John B. original stone) and Nancy Lucinda.
Dozens of Bushman family members are here in the Lehi Cemetery.
Not far from my Bushman family members are my Smuin family resting places.
Many of these are my Pioneer ancestors, who endured many hardships as they made their way West with the Saints gathering to Zion.
Families in Utah flock to cemeteries on Memorial Day Weekend. It’s so fun to watch carloads of families travel from cemetery to cemetery, decorating graves, telling stories of loved ones, and celebrating family.
Sunday afternoon we visited my mother’s grave in the Orem City Cemetery, taking flowers from our yard. My mother loved home grown beauty.
We spent time there with cousins, Janelle and Daniel Laemmlen, and then were joined by Adam and Heidi’s family, who visited her baby sister, Celestial, not far from Grace.
On Memorial Monday, all the Lewis family heads to Spanish Fork to visit John’s family members buried there. John’s parents, John & Peggy Lewis, his 3 sisters, Kathryn, Bonny and Berta are there, along with many aunts, uncles and grandparents. When I turned 40, John presented me with a deed to our own burial plots down the row from these Lewis family members. We take blankets and chairs and settle in for the afternoon with our loved ones there. We clean the headstones, arrange flowers, tell stories and sing favorite family songs like “In Frisco Town there Lived a Whale, Bill Grogan’s Goat,” and “You are my Sunshine.”
After the cemetery visiting, we all gather in our back yard for a family BBQ, for amazingly delicious summer food, visiting, volleyball and fun.
What a glorious family day. I love our family and all our relations, here and There.
