The leaning tower of Myers

I probably should have waited for a better day to record the fact that the leaning tower of Myers, my great-great-grandfather's tombstone at Salem Cemetery, leans no more. But then I wouldn't have had anything to write about this morning. I can always go back and switch out the photos --- Memorial Day weekend around here has turned gray and damp.

Jacob Myers, the patriarch, died in 1883 and this beast was erected shortly thereafter. It is a really tall tombstone --- and for as long as I can remember has been leaning to the north at what seems now, looking back, to have been a truly alarming angle.

But it's been righted as part of a general and ongoing tombstone fix-up at the cemetery so gently that you'd never know any work has been done.

The same can be said for Joab Wray and his mother, Charlotte, who had fallen into a heap; and Daniel Ragsdale and his two wives, Cynthia Ann and Sarah Jane, who had found themselves in the same position. Both vintage monuments now are standing reassembled and upright again, as are others. Paris and Mary White's hefty chunk of gray granite, leaning backwards at an angle even more gravity-defying than the Myers stone, is fully upright again, too, and no longer a threat to passers-by.

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Just for the heck of it, I decided to add up the ancestors buried in a four-county area --- Lucas, Wayne, Monroe and Appanoose (plus one cemetery just over the county line at Columbia in Marion). Conceivably, I could visit all of these folks on a single Memorial Day, but it would involve quite a hike. Here's the list:

Salem Cemetery (Lucas County): parents, Daniel and Reefa (Miller) Myers; grandparents, Irwin and Ethel (Dent) Myers; great-grandparents, Daniel and Mary Belle (Redlingshafer) Myers; great-great-grandparents, Jacob and Harriet (Dick) Myers; and great-great-great-grandmother, Doratha Redlingshafer.

Chariton Cemetery (Lucas County): Great-great-grandparents, John G. and Isabelle (Greer) Redlingshafer.

Waynick Cemetery (Lucas County): Great-great grandmother, Eliza Jane (Brown) Dent/Chynoweth and her second husband, Joseph Turner Chynoweth.

Oxford Cemetery (Lucas County): Great-grandparents, Joseph Cyrus and Mary Elizabeth (Clair) Miller; and great-great-grandparents, Jeremiah and Elizabeth (McMulin) Miller.

Bethel Cemetery (Lucas County): Great-great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth (Rhea) Rhea/Etheredge/Sargent and her second and third husbands, Thomas Etheredge and Edward E. Sargent; great-great-great-great grandmother, Mary (Rhea) Rhea/Hickman.

Lone burial (Lucas County): Great-great-great-grandfather William Clair.

Columbia Cemetery (Marion County): Grandparents, William Ambrose and Jessie Frances (Brown) Miller; great-grandparents, Joseph and Chloe (Boswell/Prentiss) Brown; and great-great-great-grandmother, Mary (Saunders) Clair.

Corydon Cemetery (Wayne County): Great-great-grandparents, Peachy Gilmer and Caroline (McDaniel) Boswell plus Moses Prentiss, first husband of my great-grandmother, Chloe (Boswell/Prentiss) Brown.

Evergreen Cemetery (Cincinnati, Appanoose County): Great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Boswell.

Pleasant Corners Cemetery (Monroe County): Great-great-great-grandparents, William and Miriam (Trescott) Miller and Joseph and Mary (Young) McMulin.

I count 35 grandparents of one degree or another --- enough for a busy Memorial Day.