Week 10 – Genealogy Road Trips: No two genealogy road trips are the same but they’re always fun and meaningful. Describe a memorable trip in your past. Where did you go? What did you find (or not find)? Did you meet any new cousins? What did the trip mean to you and your family?
This road trip started out as a plane trip and then we rented a car. My dad had a reunion of his army group, the 354th Service Squadron in Rockford, Illinois in 1999 and as he was getting pretty old at 93 and we saw that it was pretty close to Crystal Lake, Illinois where his parents were married and his grandparents lived and were buried. They did not have anything scheduled for Saturday morning so we headed for the Crystal Lake library and found several articles on the wedding of pops parents. The one that pop really liked was when they described his dad as a prosperous farmer from Minnesota. His dad never became prosperous, he was a farmer from Minnesota, and barely scraped by all his life. We also found the obits for his grandparents and they said they were buried in the Union Cemetery in Crystal Lake, so we headed for the cemetery.
This is the sign by the road and you can see in the background the monument below which is a tribute to the Union soldiers from Illinois and the battles they fought in during the Civil War.
We pulled in and stopped at a wide spot, and got out and fanned out looking for the tombstone of pops grandparents. There was three of us, pop, my sister and me and I headed back towards the road and found some very old tombstones, and then my sister yelled she found the tombstone of S.P. Dillingham and Eliza his wife, just about 3 feet from the car. It was facing the other direction or we could have read the inscription from the car. Here is that tombstone.
While Stanislaus P. Dillingham was the right age to be in the Civil War but he did not serve, and for a long time I could not figure out why, till I found out he had bad legs and could not march or stand for longer than 10 minutes, so I guess he was medically unfit. I have seen the Civil War area of a couple of our local cemeteries and they have several, but the Crystal Lake cemetery had a lot more, it is sad to see so many young men that died in war.
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