Tombstone Tuesday: Charles Frisbie and Mary Lucy (WRIGHT) STRONG

Grave of Charles Frisbie and Mary Lucy (Wright) Strong, Belle Passi Cemetery,Woodburn, Marion County,Oregon.Photographed and privately held by Miriam Robbins Midkiff,[ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE], Spokane,Washington.2005.

Last week I featured some tombstones belonging to the graves of my husband's great-grandparents, located west of Portland, Oregon. This week, I am highlighting the tombstones of my own great-great-grandparents, located south of the same city. They are buried 385 miles from me...the closest ancestral graves in my family tree. Google Maps says a trip from my home to this cemetery would take only 6 1/2 hours, but when I traveled the route during Memorial Day Weekend 2005, it took closer to 8 1/2 total. The trip from Spokane to the Portland area generally takes 6 1/2 hours, with breaks, and then the trip down to the cemetery took another couple of hours, because of the traffic we had to maneuver through in Portland.

I have two other ancestral graves located west of the Mississippi River: one is in St. Paul Minnesota (21 hours away) and one is in San Antonio, Texas (32 hours away). My own infant brother's grave is located 34 hours away in Metlakatla, Alaska. All the other ancestral graves are located east of the Mississippi; many are in Michigan, New York, Ontario, and New England. It is for this reason that I am eternally grateful for the volunteers at Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness and the photo volunteers of Find A Grave. If it were not for them, I would have no idea where many of my ancestors were buried, much less what their graves looked like.