Another "Connection"

FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH, RATON, NEW MEXICO
(click on image to enlarge)

It's always good to connect to one's past in some manner, and often that is through a physical connection with one's family or family history.  People live on in our memories, and when something stimulates that memory I often pause for a bit of . . . I'm not sure just how to term it.  It's more than nostalgia, it's a time when my consciousness drifts to past times and people, and those people really do live on in my memory.  Of course, for most of us, this only last for a couple of generations or so.

Many years ago, Barbara and I were on a road trip through France and saw a small sign "American Cemetery" pointing to the right.  With a brief nod to each other, we turned onto a narrow road that led us to a WW I  American cemetery.

The Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery   is spread over 130 undulating acres in the northeast of France near the Belgian border.  This is the largest single burial site of American WWI casualties in Europe, almost 15,000. Most were victims of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive  in which the American Expeditionary Forces lost 26,000 killed and almost 100,000 wounded.  Barbara and I went to the visitor's center and were greeted by the manager of the cemetery who was a US civil service employee at this monument-cemetery near the French-Belgium border.  He seemed overly interested in us, asking lots of questions both specific and general.  As it turns out, there were very few visitors to this place, and he was eager to spend some time talking with Americans.  It was off the main road so there were not many "accidental' or drive-by visitors, and, even in 1974-5, the second generation family of those who were buried there were largely elderly or dead themselves so visiting family members were by then few and far between.  Do most of these soldiers really "live on in memory" or are they largely now forgotten as individuals?

Now, to the picture on this post.  My father retired from his last church ministry and wanted to physically step out of the way for the church to integrate a new minister.  To do this gracefully, he took up a locums position some distance away. . . in this case Raton, NM.  He would drive to Raton, preach for two Sundays in a row,  then return to Kermit, TX for a few days before returning to Raton.  Last Winter, Barbara and I were on our way from Estes Park to Palm Springs, and stopped in Raton to fill up with gasoline.   We decided to drive the town, and see if we could find the church where my dad preached, and indeed, as the picture shows, we were successful.  I took the picture, but then toured around the church a bit, with a strong memory of my father wandering through my thoughts.

Now, I certainly remember my father well, and my kids also have some fairly decent memories as well.  Any generation to follow that will have some stories to tell, but there will be no direct memory.  Beyond that, a few anecdotes might survive, but there will be no one who truly remembers Rev. John Floyd.  This is a little sad, but true.  Genealogists (like Barbara) doing their research are a good thing to have in a family, and artifacts like books or papers with the words will help.  Pictures certainly are more plentiful than in the past, but now we have so many digital pictures with no captions (can't use a pencil to write "John Floyd" on the back of a digital file, and most people have not annotated their pictures digitally. The digital file folder in most peoples computers is little better than the old shoe box full of prints.  I have a couple of thousand slides and at least that many prints to digitize, organize, and distribute to family members.  This is no small challenge, but I think important for the future generations (but even this is likely a bit of self-deception.)

Few of us will become well known to future generations or even future civilizations (think Julius Caesar, Aristotle, etc).  What I expect will really live on from my journey here is the change, however small, that may result from how I have lived my life and how I have related to my  my family, my friends, and every other human whom I have touched in some way during my life.  I hope on the whole I will have caused more good than not.