GENEALOGICALLY GOBSMACKED YET AGAIN!

Prior to attending the Ellingwood Reunion in Norway, Me. today, Cheryl

and I took a swing through Upton Maine on business pertaining to the

West side of the family. As we drove along Route 26 Cheryl pointed out a small

cemetery we passed in or near Newry, Maine, but we didn't have time to stop

at the moment  and I didn't think there were any relatives buried there anyway,

Our business required us to keep going west on 26 through the Grafton Notch

State Park which has several natural attractions such as Screwauger, Moose Caves

and Mother Walker Falls but again, we didn't have time for sightseeing. We ended

up going straight through the park to Upton, then over the state line into Errol, N.H

before we started back Route 26 towards Norway.

O.K. Cue the Twilight Zone music now.  

 Cheryl was having trouble getting the GPS to program  the route to the reunion

and looked for a spot to pull over to fiddle with it. It just so happened that we

stopped on the side of the road next to that cemetery we saw earlier and Cheryl

suggested I get some pictures of it while she worked on the GPS. So I got out and

the first thing I saw was the grave of Drusilla Walker, the "Mother Walker" the

falls are named after. There were other gravesstones, mostly from the Wight,

Russell and Bennett families.

But then I saw these two headstones:

Yep. They're from my family.

Caleb Barker was my 3x great granduncle, a son of 4x great grandparents Jonathan

Barker and Nancy Swan, and brother to my 3xgreat grandfather Nathaniel

Barker! His wife's full name was Alice Rowe. Of course at the time I took the

photos I just knew he was most likely related to me. After we got home I looked him

up on my database, Then I went looking for the name of the cemetery and found out

on a website for Newry written by my cousin Mitch Barker that it was named the

Wight Cemetery.

I also found out that not only had Caleb Barker owned and then donated the land for

the cemetery, he was its first sexton!

So: what are the odds that of all the places we stop and I get out to take a photo

it's at that small cemetery that just happens to have more relatives butied there?

I'm gobsmacked yet again!

((You can see more pictures of the Wight Cemetery over on my other blog, The Old

Colony Graveyard Rabbit))

((Originally published 14Aug 2011 at West in New England))