A Sense of Place

On this blog, I’ve posted quite a bit about my hometown roots and my family genealogy. I fondly remember the summer of 1974, when I was a teenager and driving the seen-better-days ’63 Chevy that had been Dad’s stepfather’s. I was completing two genealogy projects: a family history of the Mom’s family, and also a record of all the tombstone inscriptions in the Pilcher Cemetery near Brownstown, IL, where much of my mom’s side of the family are buried.

The cemetery is about eight miles or so out in the country, not far from state highway 185. Along with the smaller family graveyard down the lane from the main cemetery, there were (at that time) about 200 tombstone inscriptions. My grandma, who had lived in that general area, had pointed out unmarked graves of relatives, so I wanted to record those locations, too.

To do the work, I started in the morning. I put on shorts and tank top but I figured that solitary hours spent walking in the grass didn’t require shoes, so I didn’t even bring them along. A visitor to the cemetery one day didn’t expect to see a barefoot, longhaired young man examining tombstones and carrying a clipboard. (But I’m very friendly-looking; see above.)

On one trip, I decided to drive into town and get ice cream bars and snacks at the grocery store. Such fun to feel the chilly linoleum, in contrast to the warm, coarse grass as I pushed the cart through the little IGA and then stood in line at the single check-out lane to make my purchases.

I also did research in the county courthouse, not only for this but other genealogical and local-history projects. With my sandals kicked off beneath a table, I enjoyed the feeling of the cool concrete floor of the circuit clerk’s office where estate records were kept.

One morning, driving down IL 185, pressing the clutch and accelerator with bare feet, I had an emotional experience of belonging, a sureness that I would always feel a deep connection to this place: my hometown Vandalia and the surrounding Fayette County. (My main blog has a photo of the area of that highway.) During the ensuing years, my home area has been (to use Frank Zappa’s phrase) a conceptual continuity for me. All the history teaching and writing that I’ve done connect to the summers I did local genealogy projects. And all the Bible-related and religious work that I’ve done (including most of my eighteen books) relate back to my grandma Crawford (buried in that cemetery), who inspired me to do genealogy and first got me interested in the Bible and spirituality in a very preliminary way that bloomed a year or two later.

Of course, all this would’ve happened if I’d had my shoes on, but free feet gave me a symbolic as well as literal contact with home ground—and felt wonderful on those back-then summer days.