Roots and Cherries

I have two more posts for you of our road trip and then I am back to other things, art included! While we were on the road in New York, we came close to two little towns that were settled by Daniel's ancestors. Daniel has been a genealogy enthusiast for a long time.

Some years ago, through his research, we found a large branch of his family in France that we are now very close to. We have visited them (that's an incredible story for another post) and some of them have visited us here. When one of their ancestors came to the United States from France in the 1830's, he helped settle the town of Swormville near Niagara Falls. Incidentally, the French relatives all thought that he had not survived the voyage to the New World because they never heard from him again. Were they surprised when they found out about all their relatives in the States!

Daniel thinks that this might be the house his ancestors built and lived in.
Of course, we had to visit the old cemeteries to see if we found any headstones with his family names. And we did!! It was also interesting for me to see how many headstones were engraved entirely in German.


Then, further on our way in New York, we came by the small town of Lima, which was settled by a different branch of Daniel's family. This meant visiting the church and graveyard, where we didn't find anything, but many of the old headstones were so weathered that they were unreadable.


We decided to ask at the gas station if there were any other old cemeteries in the area. The attendant gave us some directions, which she wasn't sure about. We decided to follow them and found the yellow barn she was talking about.
Just beyond the yellow barn, to the right of the road we found a tiny, very old cemetery, barely visible. We couldn't believe she even knew of its existence. There were hardly any headstones with legible inscriptions and many were missing altogether.
The big find, though, were the huge and old cherry trees filled with delicious black cherries. We both ate our fill!


I've been working on several pieces of art these past few days and here's a little sneak peek. I'm playing with a whole new technique, which is so much fun! I'll share more about it soon...
Hope you are all having a lovely weekend!!