Well, we have reached the 6th day of our fabulous trip to Europe. I took Mollie on one of my patented early morning adventure walks. We set out from cousin Dot’s house at the crack of dawn, and soon found the old village church. We are still in the town of Leyland in Lancashire, Northwest of London. I will post another map later.
We saw other interesting things on our adventure walk, my daughter and I, but most of the pictures either have her in them, which I am not supposed to share, or just aren’t all that exciting.
But there is something awesome about an old English church in an old English town, especially on an overcast morning. There were some really old headstones in that cemetery. You can’t help but think of all those families, going to this church for generations, living long and short lives and then ending up right back at the church where they had been christened and baptized and probably married as well… talk about the circle of life.
Also, that church and its attendant burial ground leads us neatly to this church, which we visited later on the way to another adventure. Dot took us to this church to see this headstone…
This is a little confusing, but that is a big piece of our family history, way back before some of us moved to America and somehow ended up with the ‘E’ on the end of our last name. George and Cicely are my dad’s grandparents. So Tom was my great-uncle… I guess… except for the fact that I was adopted… but other than that, this where I come from.
So that church played a huge role in my family’s history.
There is my mom and aunt Dot… who, I may have forgotten to mention is also our cousin Lynne’s mom, and Josh’s grandmother, if you remember them from our time in London… posing with this remarkable headstone.
Is it weird to pose around a headstone?
That one is a bunch of other cousins, and later on, Mollie, with the help of my mom and Dot, recreated our entire family tree… which I probably won’t bore you with… but who knows.
Pouring My Art Out 
The village I grew up in the has a really old church and I remember reading the stones when I was little, during the 16-1800’s it seemed to be quite common to say people fell asleep, let me tell you reading that as a kid led to some restless nights lol but I still love wondering round graveyards and nothing wrong at all with posing with headstones,
When I was a teenager, we used the cemetery near my house as a park… I have done lots of posts about it.
Certainly not weird to pose around a tombstone, I’d think.
The smiles seem a little out of place I guess.
Wow, they make good use of their holy ground over there don’t they?
It is sort of the tradition.
It’s not a bad tradition, it makes a lot of sense and the bones don’t get so lonely
In the early days, most villagers never traveled more than a few miles from the village they grew up in.
I know people like that
we all do…
That is quite amazing… no snarky comments from me. Rah-spect!
It is hard to make fun of dead family members… even for you… HA!
I think this is the first time I have seen “and also…” on a headstone. That is one pile of family history on one rock. Very cool.
we have history