The Hartley Sentinel-The Everly/Royal News - Serving O'Brien & Clay Counties

The use of fences around cemeteries has changed over the years. I’m not sure what the trend is for cemeteries these days, but if you look around, you will see a lot of different kinds of fences. All cemeteries seem to have trees and flowers, but not all are fenced.

My wife, Rita, and I both come from large families. Rita was the youngest of five children, and there were six children in my family. My dad had six kids in his family, and my mom had seven. Rita’s dad came from a family of seven kids, and her mom from a family of four. Our grandparents all came from large families, as well. My grandpa Hembd took the prize, though, since he was the middle child in a family of 19! Rita and I have attended a lot of family funerals.

The family tree seems to thrive in small communities. The roots are deep, and even though the branches are strong, they don’t spread very far. Rita’s grandparents, for example, were twin brothers that married sisters. That makes for a lot of cousins and second cousins. Many of the family members lived in Ocheyedan or towns nearby. It seemed there was a relative everywhere you turned.

Rita, being the youngest of her family, was often taken along to visit relatives she didn’t know. Most of these people were older than her, and as a child, she didn’t always have someone to play with. She listened to conversations, but didn’t always understand them. She attended funerals of family members, but didn’t always know them. Her parents instilled a love of family in her that is still present today.

Our family also visited relatives and attended funerals in the Ocheyedan area. Some of the cemeteries we visited had fences inside of fences, since in days past, families took care of their own grave sites. The parochial school I attended had a cemetery behind the church with a fence surrounding it, and inside the fence was a row of evergreen trees. We loved playing in those trees during our recess times, but were careful not to disturb any tombstones while playing there.

Rita started doing genealogy research long before computers were available. As a good husband, I dutifully went with her to courthouses, libraries and churches to find people of interest to her. We would sift through hand-written records that were often musty smelling and hard to read. We would go to the cemetery, track down the grave and take a picture of the headstone. We would use our vacation time and weekends for these “treasure hunts.”

One of these hunts took us to Brownsville, Minn., to find tombstones of some of the Hembd relatives. We had been there before and found family members in the Brownsville town cemetery, but not the Catholic cemetery across the street. We learned there was yet another cemetery nearby in Crooked Creek Township.

Finding the Crooked Creek cemetery proved to be a challenge. Gravel roads twisted and turned, and trees and bluffs were abundant. We finally found a cemetery on the side of a hill, but since there was no road leading to it, we walked across a pasture to the fenced-in cemetery. When we got there we discovered there was no gate and hogs were rooting around the fence. With one eye on the hogs, I straddled the fence quickly, but then went back to give my petite wife a boost. We discovered this was a family cemetery, and not the one we were looking for. Over the fence again, past the hogs, and back to the car. Strangely, there was no fence beside the road.

Since it was getting late in the afternoon, we decided to ask for directions. The first guy we saw was standing beside his truck relieving himself. He gave us a wave with his free hand. We didn’t stop. The next guy was feeding his cattle, and told us we were about a mile away. This time there was a gate to the cemetery and no hogs rooting by the fence. We got our information, and decided to leave before it got dark.

A couple years ago we visited a cemetery in Ava, Mo. Rita’s great-grandpa Noble and his daughter were buried there in 1894, victims of a Diphtheria epidemic. This cemetery sprawled out over a large area, had a fence on three sides and houses on the fourth side. We had been there before, but this time we decided to repair the tombstone. We were with Rita’s sister, Marilyn, her brother Larry, and his wife, Rosemary. Marilyn’s husband, Richard, had made a new base for the stone a few years earlier. Richard passed away, so we decided to finish the project in his honor. Digging up and resetting the marker was a project that took more time than we anticipated. When we finished, we found a tombstone with another family member that had died about the same time. We cleaned the stone, but decided the base was good enough. Besides, it was starting to get dark outside.

We have visited numerous cemeteries and are aware of the stories told about them. Some say fences are needed to keep the spirits from flying away. There are stories about vampires, headless horsemen and skeletons seen by moonlight. Rita, however, will often take her camera and notebook and walk alone through our local cemeteries. When she gets the documentation she needs, she comes home to load this information into her computer to be shared with anyone who needs it.

Being a good husband, though, I always remind her to be home before dark.

Roger Brockshus is retired and lives in Spirit Lake. Besides writing, he keeps himself busy with a small lawn business and also volunteers in his church and community. Roger and his wife, Rita, enjoy spending whatever time they can with their children and grandchildren.