When I was in college—before my passion for genealogy developed—my walks to town took a shortcut through a cemetery. However, I ended up lingering to read the inscriptions on the stones, identifying who was related and imagining what these people’s lives might have been like.  I remember a row of markers from the 1860s for one family: a father, a mother and several of their infant children who died within a few years of each other.  I considered the sorrow this family felt and wondered whether illness or accident caused the children’s deaths. Continue reading →