union hill cemetery

This is a photograph of Union Hill Cemetary in Weissport Pennsylvania - in 'the mountains' according to my mother's relatives.  There are a number of family gravestones here.  Joe Nihen of findagrave.com very kindly sent me this photograph.  My great-grandfather's gravestone is here.  Joe is compiling an online 'virtual graveyard' for the members of Pennsylvania's 28th Volunteer Infantry, of which my great-grandfather was Corporal in Company E before his "leg was shot off."  You can visit the site here.

The name Union Hill apparently has nothing to do with the Civil War.  Joe says there are very few soldiers buried there.  It turns out my great-grandfather was a member of the Methodist-Episcopal Church, so perhaps this cemetary was associated with them.  There doesn't seem to be any information available on the derivation of the name.  There was an American Union Methodist Episcopal Church founded during Alfred's lifetime, so perhaps it had something to do with that.  There seem to have been quite a few Methodists around at the time and I still hear Methodists today talking about the Methodist Union. 

My husband's great great grandfather 'took' the name of Jones as his middle name, to celebrate a great man - probably Absolom Jones, an African American leader who was also involved with the early African Methodist denominations.  It would seem that some of the early African-Americans ended up being 'white' rather than 'black.'  If you click on the link to my great-grandfather's tombstone (link is above), you will see a three-petaled form that my husband says is a Native American motif that goes back a long way.  There is no 'cross' on the tombstone either.  I don't claim to know, I'm just trying to understand these people who were my forbears.

Comments

[Peter]

What gets me is that there aren't that many "greats" before the word "grandfather" - there aren't that many generations separating me from my ancestors who fought in the Civil War - mostly for the South. Sometimes, something happens that opens old wounds as if the war were fought more recently. The reaction by many in Richmond to the proposal that a statue of Lincoln be erected there is an example.

[kasturi]

hi peter,

I know. And the distance seems to get smaller everyday. When I was a kid they seemed almost not to exist, my great-grandparents - but now, I realize how much their influence was still felt in our household. My mother was practically raised by her grandmother, so she repeated a lot of her pedagogical principles with me, plus we had so many of my great-grandparents' things in our home as well, as demonstrated in the current post on our snail-shell bureau. Their influence was definitely felt.

As to the Civil War, our family, and our whole neighborhood in Phila, was kind of on the cusp of the north-and-south, as were many families I would imagine. At least we had many people from West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the Carolinas in our neighborhood - as well as newcomers from Europe after the war against the Axis powers. Quite a mix. But wars seem, in a way, so artificial to me. They seem so 'drummed up' and then a lot of good people put their whole hearts and souls into it, and give up limbs, like my great-grandfather did, or their lives or their homes and fortunes and jobs - and all for what? They make it out to be that the Civil War was all about freeing the slaves, but that wasn't what it was about at all, just like today you would think WWII was all about rescuing the Jews from the Holocaust, when in reality, the holocaust was hardly known about during the war itself. It was really about aggression in the form of a mighty land-grab. But maybe I'm just in a cynical mood today.