That sounds exactly like the kind of cemetery this is going to be.   It’s on maps with question marks, and it goes by the same name colloquially as another cemetery for further confusion.  Someone in this forum mentions having spent hours looking for it in the tiny township where we know it is hidden and finding it once but never again.  The scant photos on FindAGrave look like the headstones are in Ferngully, there’s so much overgrowth.  It’s rumored to be on private land.  I’m going to have to find someone to beg for permission even if I do locate it.  But it’s old, there’s Revolutionary War guys there, and on my dad’s side, I’m from people who came before it. 

It’s apparently largely a family called Booher, which isn’t mine, but my family (or the branch that’s been at the core of this investigation and is all the photos I’ve been sharing) is secretly actually everyone in the county.  They assimilated a few Boohers, and so there are a few of my crew in that cemetery.   

Seeing what shape so many of these things are in staggers me.  I want to find Mary Melissa’s mother Elizabeth so much, but she could literally be unmarked and unrecorded somewhere.  I don’t even know when she died.  

I’m digitizing an index that was made in 1991 of the entire web of descendants from one stray guy from Germany and I recognize so many of the names when I look at the cemeteries now.  I have a fuller picture of the people they knew and who was close by and girls getting married so young and I feel like I’m in an aquarium, in that one room that always has you walking through it with water around and above and you’re just there marveling at this dome of Big around you

I don’t share a surname with them, but I’ve been so deep in it these past few months I sometimes forget I don’t.  I talk about them with ‘us’ and ‘we’ sometimes.  And I look at all the surnames that have led to me and I think, “I’m a [surname], too.”   I would have a different surname entirely if a man named Robert hadn’t died in a car accident in 1941.  His widow married the man I called my Pap and he adopted her children, changing their last name to the one I have now.   It’s the name I was born with but it feels gifted to me.    I think this is why I feel like I’m everyone and everyone is me now, instead of super focused on just what is directly tied to my surname.  (That and wanting to de-patrilinealize this kinda shit.)

I sure did do a lot of words here, but my overall feeling is this big hybrid of historical excitement, biological circumstantial awe and wonder, overwhelming need to love and protect people born a century before me, and Gotta Catch ‘Em All.