CREEPY IN A FUN SORT OF WAY!!

Yesterday I did something that I haven't done in a few years... I went traipsing through a cemetery! Now mind you, I NEVER go to a cemetery for actual people that I know because it just skeeves me, but for some reason, these people that have been gone for hundreds of years, well, they're just cool!

When my cousins and I were researching our family tree, a nice elderly gentleman, Mr. Smith, from the Somerset Historical Society in NJ took so much time helping us in our search. He took us to the Ten Eyck Cemetery, the family Dairy Farm, a house that belonged to an ancestor that was a Colonial in the Revolutionary War and so on. He spent countless hours discovering a lot about our family tree.

We have kept in touch throughout the years through occasional emails. Yesterday I received an email from him. He has been researching his 4 family tree lines. He just found that one of the lines had a few generations that were from WANTAGH in the 1700's through the mid 1800's !! He asked if I could email the names of old cemeteries that were in Wantagh. Well, I did more than that. I went online and found out the burial listings of the 4 oldest ones in Wantagh. His family was buried in the JERUSALEM FRIENDS CEMETERY at the Baptist Church.

Jerusalem Friends Cemetery

The funny thing about this is how things in life go in circles. Here, this man helped my cousins and I and now we find that the cemetery where his ancestors are buried is right at the end of the block that I grew up on!! I used to pick blueberries in there and the neighborhood kids and I held sayonces in there!! I used to sit under a tree across the street from the cemetery to do my homework on nice days!

I grabbed my camera and took a ride to the cemetery. I had a very hard time reading a lot of the stones because they're like 300 years old! I got stuck in the thorns (is that an omen?) of the wild bushes as I made my way into the brush to find his ancestors. Low and behold, there they were. His were so much easier to read than the others which was weird. I took lots of pictures for him. Through the pictures, he was able to add another Smith to the list as that one was never mentioned!

It was also interesting to look at the other stones. This cemetery has TONS of graves from very prominent people from Wantagh's beginning... Seamann, Powell, Hicks, Jones and Jackson.

Today I'm going to one more old cemetery on Oakfield Ave in Wantagh where a few other ancestors are buried.

For someone that has NO INTEREST in history, I thoroughly enjoyed myself!!!