Cemetery in the Cornfield

Sunday was a beautiful spring day, so beautiful that I was able to entice Bill to actually leave the house and take a walk. Both of us have an interest in genealogy and before I began letterboxing, it
was my obsession. Bill comes from a family which has its roots in Lancaster county and we headed to Schoeneck to visit a graveyard in a cornfield. If you look at the very center of the horizon in this picture, you can see the little dark spot which is the cemetery. Bill and I have been together for six years and we have driven to this spot many times and just looked from the car at this site but today, I decided was the day to actually go and visit his ancestors. "But what if someone doesn't want us there!" he exclaimed. And I patiently explained to him that they would then ask us to leave and we would do just that.

We started our hike to the graveyard by walking on freshly plowed earth. Thank heavens I had grabbed an old pair of hiking shoes and put them in the car because I definitely needed them. Walking on soft ground is not fun. And it was even less fun as I began to feel the pull on my foot which I had injured last month. And to top it off, although you can't really see it in this photo, we had to walk uphill. But we made it and I am very glad that we did.

The graveyard is in deplorable condition although Bill says that it is looking much better than the first time he actually visited it. Some other family members have spent some time clearing the brush out and standing the broken gravestones up against the stone wall. The location was so peaceful though, it was easy to see why his family would have chosen this site as their final resting place.

After spending some time thinking about the past, we headed a bit north, right into Schoeneck to visit the Steinmetz graveyard which contains the gravestone honoring Ulrich Schurch, Bill's first grandfather to come to the US from Switzerland. This tombstone is pretty neat because it details a lot of information about Ulrich and his descendants, although you can't read it too well in this photo. I am not sure that Ulrich is actually buried here but the stone is here in the land that he settled in.

After leaving the graveyards and moseying our way back to Berks county, we made our first stop of the year at Behringers for ice cream. If the perfect weather wasn't a sure enough sign that spring is finally here, the fact that Behringers is open absolutely sealed the fact.