Burgenland is a state of Austria encompassing the entire eastern border adjacent to Hungary. The Bucklige Welt, or Hunchback World, is a region of foothills situated in the southeastern corner of Lower Austria particularly suited to hiking and biking. Also called “The Land of a Thousand Hills,” Bucklige Welt shares the northern corner of Burgenland. As an American “tourist,” I’d describe the area as Austria’s best-kept secret.
The secrets to my Semitic past have been left behind in the remaining homes, synagogues, and cemeteries of the Austrian Jews from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. The unfortunate tides of history have forever altered access to those secrets. Homes and synagogues were torn down and aryanized while cemeteries were desecrated and/or destroyed. Larger cemeteries in key cities were often lost to the ravages of war. Many of those cities, such as Wiener Neustadt, have made quite successful attempts at restoring their historical town centers to their former glory, despite the loss of vibrant and thriving Jewish sectors. (more…)
Over the summer, Stories From the Past was never far from my mind. In fact, I felt a lot of anxiety over no posts, but between two grandkids and a broken PC (I have six grandkids but two were staying with me), my ability to blog was reduced to bits and snatches of time with a tablet or a phone. Have you ever tried to blog from your tablet or phone? Well, I’m a perfectionist, so I wasn’t even going to attempt it. In fact, I suffer from perfection paralysis. It’s a real thing, which means that if I can’t do something right, I’m not going to do it at all. Thankfully, knowing you have a problem is the first step in solving it, and I am now working hard to get over my fear of doing a less-than-perfect job. Now that both grandkids are back at home and in school, and I have a new PC, Stories From the Past is ready to roll, and I’m gearing up to launch a professional, remodeled, website for 2019.
back at work ( I hope it’s true that a messy desk is a sign of a genius mind.)
Many of you are waiting for stories about your own ancestors, and if I told you I’d be writing about them, I WILL. In fact, I hope to be turning several of them into books. I’m getting started right away on at least one of them, but I consider this just the beginning, knowing it can only get better from here.
I don’t have a set priority list, with the exception of the story that started it all, and that will be The Second Wife’s Story. Mary Davis Skeen is the subject of my first book, so all of you Davis/Davies/Skeen progeny can look forward to getting the first read. I plan to publish the unedited book one chapter at a time. I’ve been planning to author a book for more than three decades now, so all I can say about that is it’s ABOUT time!
So here is my list of proposed subjects for the next few months and well into 2019:
Mary Davis Skeen (The Second Wife’s Story)
The Jews of Pitten, Austria (Specifically the ones who lived next door to my great-great-grandfather, Rudolf Abeles.)
Rosa Rebecca Abeles
Mary Rogers Damron
Sgt. Bernard Kwiatkowski and the WWII 5th Airforce 90th Bomb Group
new cemeteries
Kentucky slavery and the U.S. Civil War
Blog posts are scheduled Wednesday at 10 AM of each week.
Next Week: A special thanks to Ruth Contreras
Ancestor Landing pages for specific blog subjects will appear on the first of each month. October’s Landing page is Thomas Davies (1816 Llannelly, Carmarthenshire, Wales – 1899 Plain City, Weber, Utah, USA)
It looks like thursday posts are becoming a habit. So thursday it is.
This Cemetery is Hiding a Secret
I found the West Weber cemetery while driving the back roads in Weber County. It is in a small farm town located West of Ogden, Utah on the plains between the mountains and the north end of the Great Salt Lake. As I got closer to the cemetery itself, I noticed that most of the tombstones, even the newer ones, are a deep rust color. The newer tombstones are a lighter red, while the older ones are almost brownish-black.
While it’s a bit disappointing to see the tombstones covered in a reddish-film, it’s also pretty cool. The dark color of the tombstones make it difficult to get a decent photograph for identifying people buried there, but the dark red color adds a mystique that can even be called “creepy” at Halloween time. However, the secret of this graveyard is not in the discolored graves. (more…)
It’s rare that you come across a cemetery this well-loved. Around here, cemeteries are clean, lawns are watered and mowed regularly, and a caretaker cleans up old grave decorations. But I’ve never seen a cemetery like this one. As soon as I laid eyes on it, I knew that I would get some good pictures, even though I was using my cell phone. I didn’t expect to get a panoramic view that I could use for my header photo, but as you can clearly see, it worked out great. Here’s another panorama:
I don’t think Springville Cemetery always looked this good. I can imagine it overgrown with weeds, and tombstones knocked over and used for target practice by rambunctious kids. Now it is completely fenced and cleaned up, but the oldest tombstones needed rescuing. Some, beyond repair, were rescued anyway:
October is my favorite month of the year. It may or may not be because of my birthday, but I do know that it is because of Halloween. It is probably a combination of things: Halloween, my birthday, autumn, and the general feeling of anticipation mixed with dread as the harvest is gathered in preparation for the coming of the dark, cold days of winter. I feel a sense of romance as leaves change colors, pumpkins appear on porch steps, and figures of ghosts are hung from molting trees. I love the dark evenings when candles are lit and ghost stories are told. I love the cold crisp smell of the air. It’s the perfect month for celebrating cemeteries.
Balyna Parish Cemetery in Ireland. Did you know that our modern day celebration of Halloween comes from Ireland?
October is a time for romance, the kind of romance that elicits feelings of excitement, nostalgia and mystery–a sentimental mood that lends a listening ear towards the unknown things of the past. Graveyards are some of the most romantic places I know. They are the places that keep the things of the past in a state of limbo–we know the stories are there, but they are buried with the storytellers and remain in the realm of the unknown. Cemeteries are the true places of Untold Stories.
So in the spirit of cemeteries and storytelling, I will be sharing bits and pieces of stories of the past told by others. Today, I’d like to share a comment made on my own Untold Stories from a fellow blogger, Jeff Roberts:
“We grow up believing graveyards to be haunted. It was almost a rite of passage to test your bravery by visiting the forgotten after midnight. We all thought we saw ghosts as shadows danced from grave to grave by the reflective moonlight….. given time and some maturity this perspective changed. The hauntings became monuments. The monuments became people. These people became giants. Not all who walk this earth are compelled to understand the past that shapes our present.
I am one so fortunate. As a kid hiking the sage & juniper, I saw much more than just nature. Humanity had been here. An arrowhead, a wagon trail trace, a metate, a stump, a rusted ring from a barrel, and a purple glint… glass from a pioneer traveller. Eventually it became my task to make sense out of 150 years of cemetery records. An opportunity to find the lost or the misplaced or the forgotten. An opportunity to connect this grave with that grave or that grave with that family. An opportunity to reconnect people with their past. An opportunity to tell a hundred stories. And what stories and what men and women and what toil and what sacrifice and what tragedy and what sorrow and what joy.”
Thank you, Jeff, for keeping the romance alive; and Happy Graveyard Month!
I wrote the original Untold Stories more than ten years ago. At that time, there was little information to be found on the internet, and since I no longer lived in the area, I had to wait to get my questions about the Skeen family answered. I’ve been doing my research on my own free time, knowing that there was a story there. I haven’t been disappointed. Thanks to a few phone calls, Family Search, Ancestry.com, Plain City Utah.org, and one more trip to the Plain City Cemetery, I was able to find all the information that I needed to complete the Skeen’s story. The story coincides with the history of town itself, so it must be told as part of the town’s history.
William Skeen. Courtesy of Ancestry.com
William Dolby Skeen was born in 1839 in Steelville Pennsylvania, son to Joseph Skeen, and brother to Lyman Skeen, all of whom were primary settlers in the Plain City , Utah area. The three men were among a larger group of Mormon pioneers who had originally settled in Lehi, but left to scout out an area in Weber County for a place with rich land for farming and a good water source. The area now known as Plain City lies at the edge of a delta where the Weber River fans out upon entering the Great Salt Lake. These early pioneers found that they could use water from the river for irrigation, and culinary water could easily be found by sinking wells. It was a good spot with plenty of water for their small party of pioneers. This group of men staked claim to the land, and are therefore among the founders of Plain City. (more…)
StoriesFromthePast.com 