Churches, Cemeteries and Hillbillies

Thanks to being bored at my cousin Phil’s house in Hesperia, California in July 2008, I click on one of his favorites, Ancestry.com, and I’ve been addicted to genealogy research and finding my peeps ever since. It plays right into my enjoyment of research, writing and road trips. It’s very interesting and it’s also a nice excuse to reach out to family I’ve rarely, if ever, met like my cousins Don, Joni, Janet and my Aunt Wanda (who is 75, but would pass for 50). I’ve even made a trip to Chester, Illinois to visit my brother, Jeff, who I honestly thought I’d never see again after my dad died in 1999.

In the past year, I’ve visited cemeteries, libraries, courthouses, random folks in random towns and spent countless hours scanning the interwebs in search of the past.

What follows is a story of one such journey…

About a month ago, I made a trek to Wilton, Missouri to visit the Goshen Primitive Baptist Church Cemetery and met my cousin, Don, and his wife, Joan there. Goshen Cemetery sits atop a hill in an old farming pasture that overlooks the Missouri River in the distance. In fact, that’s how it became a cemetery to begin with. Back in the 1800s a worker died on a steamboat on the Missouri River from disease and they wanted to bury him as soon as possible, so they docked in Wilton, Missouri in search of a burial plot. A local farmer offered a spot up on a hill in his pasture and Goshen Cemetery was born.
It turns out that our great, great, great, great grandfather (G4G), Berryman Wren, was one of the original 12 founders of the church and served as its first Elder/pastor from 1832 to 1867. (Hard to believe there’s that much religion in branches of any tree from which I come, huh?) We were in search of the final resting places of Elder Wren, his son, William (G3G), and our great great grandmother, Susan Frances Wren Smallwood Neely.

Grave hunting is another fascinating task. You go to a cemetery in search of a grave to snap a photo or get a small snippet of information you didn’t have before, like a date of birth or a spouse’s name. Often, when you look around that grave, you find more family members than you ever knew you had. Goshen was that kind of place – there were great, great grandparents (and beyond) and innumerable cousins, twice removed, etc. The grass was more than ankle high and soaked in the prior night’s dew, so after several hours of ambling among rows of gravestones photographing any surname that sounded familiar from my research, I was in need of dry socks. We located the graves of Berryman, William and Fannie, and those of many other distant relatives, thus our mission was complete.In the week prior to our visit, Don had attempted calls to the church to no avail and an email to its pastor, Pastor Steve Flowers. Since there is no activity at the church during the week, Don did not get a response until after our visit. When he got home, he was met by an email from the pastor, himself. Pastor Flowers invited Don to visit the church some Sunday to share what information he had on Elder Wren and the Goshen Cemetery and Don passed that invitation on to me. Of course, I contacted Pastor Flowers as I am always in search of a southern Missouri adventure. So we headed down to Wilton last Sunday in search of the dead.

Pastor Flowers was a great guy who didn't try to convert us at all (at least this time!). He seemed to genuinely want to help me with my research. He gave me a book called "A Brief Modest History of Goshen Primitive Baptist Church" that he co-wrote with another Elder. He also had a hand written diary of sorts from the 1830s - 1860s that made many mentions of Berryman Wren and what was going on in the church. He's in the process of digitizing it and will send me a copy once it's done.

Another man, Harold Nichols, to whom I may be related somehow, was also there with Pastor Flowers. He, too, was genuinely interested in helping us with our history lesson. He brought me a 16-page book that he, his wife and another couple painstakingly compiled in 1999 called the "Complete Listing of Tombstones in Goshen Primitive Baptist Church." Yep. They are all in there up to December 1999. It's awesome.

I will go back there to be baptized on the banks of the Muddy Missouri sometime in the fall. There is a chicken dinner on October 17 to which Pastor Flowers invited us. He said that many of my “kinfolk” would be there. How can I miss that? Chicken and kinfolk? My two favorite things!

After we left Goshen, I looked at Karen (our GPS) and saw that I had put a few other cemeteries into it a long time ago and never visited them yet. They were within 5 miles of Goshen! So, of course, we went. For the record, we DID drive through monsoon-type rain for most of the day. As we drove down a gravel road en route to a cemetery, there were a few signs that read, "Impassible During High Water," "Flooding, blah, blah, blah," but I kept going. Kept going, that is, until there was water covering the road. At that point, I back up the Camry and found a detour.

I had the laptop with me, so I looked up who was buried in those cemeteries. The first cemetery only had one Allen relative (my great grandmother’s family). I didn't know who he was offhand and it was raining cats and dogs, so we went to the Old Union Cemetery in Columbia, Missouri. There, we found G3 grandparents (Richard and Katherine Allen), my great uncle (Green Norris Allen - who was crushed to death between 2 train cars in 1918) and a few other relatives. It was raining like a banshee, so Julia stayed in the car as I traversed the soft ground of plots with my camera and umbrella. Even in the rain, my feet did not get as wet as the day Don, Joan and I went to Goshen.

I got a few photos and I wanted Julia to see Mokane, Missouri, where my grandfather lived between 1910 and 1920 so we headed there.

Here's where it gets a bit strange. Once we arrived, we went into a little grocery store that Don, Joan and I had parked across from a few weeks prior. I asked the woman if Mokane had a library and that I was looking for history on the town. She said they didn't have a library, but that the owner of the store had a photo album of old photos from the 1800s onward and told me where he lived and that I should talk with him. She also told me the name "Mokane" came from the names of railroad lines - the Missouri (MO), the Kansas (KA) and the Northeast (NE). That was a cool little tidbit. Then she went and found the photo album and let us look at it. Not even thinking, I went to the car to get my laptop and scanner. As we thumbed through the photos, the owner's wife showed up to the store and came into the story pretty late and we could tell she was uneasy with the city folk. She was a bit standoffish, but talked to us a bit. She could easily kick my ass, let's just say that.

So I had the laptop sitting there and we went through the photos. I made a stack of a few things I wanted to scan. When I got the scanner out, she said, "Whatteryou plannin' awn doin'?" which translated means, "What are you planning to do with your highly technological instruments, the likes of which my Mokanian eyes have never seen? I am flummoxed." I was surprised with her question, but somehow managed to answer, "I was going to scan a few of the photos. Is that okay?" to which she simply said, "No." I was a bit shocked by that answer. I guess I was rude for not asking her directly if I could scan them, but the clerk lady who gave us the album knew the plan and was cool with it. She just said that they were her husband's photos and that it was "his thing" and told me to go to the library in Fulton. It was odd because she told us how he tapes all the photos up in the window of the store for the Labor Day Parade, so why we he care if I copied a few? For fear of a down-home, backwoods ass kicking and body dump in the Muddy Missouri, I acted like it was no big deal and put my technology away and we left town like big-city outlaws.

And that’s all I have to say about that.