An unmarked grave

A story of ancestral grief and love

Potter’s field, Dodge Grove Cemetery, Mattoon, Illinois. ©Cynthia Edstrom 2022

I found her buried in the potter’s field, the place where the poor and unclaimed were buried, in Mattoon, Illinois. Her name was Lovisa Tuttle Vandeventer and she was my maternal 3x great-grandmother. I had arrived in south-central Illinois to explore my mother’s people who had settled here in the 1800s.  Even today, this is an out of the way place of small towns and farm fields several hours south of Chicago.  I had driven from Montana to a fiber spinning conference in southeastern Wisconsin, near where I grew up. Since I was nearby (by Montana standards), I decided to go exploring after the conference. One must purposely go to this part of Illinois. It is not on the way to anywhere else. So, I decided to see what I might find.

I’ve long been interested exploring my ancestry. I also enjoy television programs about finding one’s ancestors. “Finding Your Roots” and “Who Do You Think You Are” are two series I’ve particularly enjoyed.  These programs focus on celebrity guests as they learn about ancestors they didn’t know they had or who were shrouded in mystery. Who doesn’t like a good mystery? These people are changed by learning of their ancestors struggles, discovering their strengths and resilience, as well as discovering tragic and sometimes ugly stories. Inevitably, people will be moved, often to tears as they encounter the places and people who made their lives possible. Through connecting with their ancestors, the person who is the focus of the story discovers, and comes to understand deeply, the miracle of their own lives. I love this stuff and often sharing their tears.   

 I’ve been doing research with my family for years. We use ancestry.com because my dad set up an account years ago, then my brothers and I inherited i¹.  Because of this research, I knew that most of my mother’s people had moved west through Illinois in the early 1800s once it opened to settlers².  I was glad to have a few days to poke around and see what I could find.

Nothing substitutes for being on the ground in a place. And so, I found myself driving through rural south-central Illinois - an area of big farm fields and tiny towns. Most towns barely have a tavern, a cafe, a grain elevator, and/or a cemetery. Given how rural the area is today, I can only imagine how isolated and wild it must have been when my ancestors arrived. How glad they must have been for the arrival of the railroads!

I hoped to visit the towns whose names I knew from records of my ancestors. I wanted to see if I could find ancestral burial sites at the small cemeteries spread out over three counties, and I wanted to see what I could find out about their lives by visiting libraries or historical societies. 

Most of the libraries and historical societies turned out to be tiny. Some were rarely open, but I was able to arrange to meet up with a woman from the Coles County historical society at the Charleston, Illinois, library.  It was a nice sized library with a little room filled with old local books and records, plus filing cabinets full of folders that contain some information donated by families. Sadly for me, I found little that was new. My ancestors didn’t leave very much of a trail.  I enjoyed visiting with the woman in the library anyway and was able to settle a few small questions.

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On my first day in the area, I visited a cemetery in North Okaw, Illinois.  North Okaw is a tiny farming settlement, just a collection of a few homes surrounded by fields and larger farms. At least three generations of my ancestors had lived here. One house looked a bit like a storefront and had a vending machine on the porch. Another nearby house had a sign that said, “pay water bills here”.   Soon, I found Pleasant Grove Baptist Church on the outskirts of this town. The story is that my 2x great-grandfather, William Johnson, was once the preacher there.  As I arrived, I briefly introduced myself to a man who walked out from a nearby house.  He turned out to be the minister, but he showed little interest in why I might be there. He waved me toward the cemetery indicating I should help myself, then he moved on to chat with a teenaged boy who had just ridden up in a tiny cart drawn by a pony.  The day was gray and drizzly, just the right mood for meeting dead relatives.  I headed to the cemetery behind the church

Pleasant Grove Cemetery, North Okaw, Illinois ©Cynthia Edstrom 2022

.I was able to find ancestors’ burial places fairly easily because there are photos of many of the headstones online.  Volunteers across the country go out to cemeteries, taking photos and documenting their locations in a databased called FindAGrave.com.  It’s quite amazing and I’m grateful for their work. So, I stood out in the drizzle of rural Illinois with my iPad (via cell service).  I could pull up photos of the headstones through Ancestry.com and Findagrave.com, look at the background buildings and trees in the photos and from that, I was able to locate the photo location, thus the gravestone. Some, like the old obelisk that marks where my Hart great-great-grandparents are buried were easy to find from across the lawn. Others took some hunting. In the end, they were all close together. 

I was able to find two sets of my maternal great-great grandparents there. Henry and Miranda (Vandeventer) Hart were my grandmother’s mother’s parents; William and Marilda (Faust) Johnson were my grandmother’s father’s parents. Thus, they are my 2x maternal great-grandparents.  Many other relatives were there - children, brothers, sisters, in-laws, grandchildren - all buried in that little cemetery. I felt a bit of awe and curiosity as I found these folk’s burial sites and wondered about their lives.  But I didn’t feel any particularly strong emotions. 

That changed the day I went looking for my 3x great-grandmother, Lovisa Tuttle Vandeventer (Miranda Vandeventer Hart’s mother - see above). I had been curious about her for some reason - perhaps because her name is unusual for modern times - ever since I’d been given a copy of three pages of notes handwritten by Minnie (Hart) Johnson. Minnie is my great grandmother and Lovisa’s granddaughter.

A page from Minnie Johnson’s handwritten document ©Jason Green 2022

I had poured over these pages for hours, drawing out a family tree by hand on paper, returning to study them from time to time.  Years later, I would be able to add them to the family tree on Ancestry.com getting a clearer picture of who the people were and collaborating with other people through the online database.  Without that little document, I’d know almost nothing about my mother’s people. Because of it, I was now in south-central Illinois revisiting life in the mid 1800s. 

On the day I set out to the cemetery in Mattoon, Illinois, where Lovisa was buried, I awoke with a curious and unusual feeling of guilt and emotional lability. The day was November 1^st, Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), celebrated in Mexico as a day to feast, celebrate, and visit departed family. Although not Mexican³, I love the idea of feasting to celebrate my dead relatives much more that the more fright-based candy-fest of Halloween most Americans celebrate October 31st. With this in mind, I stopped in a grocery store while my electric car charged up for the day, looking for something fitting for a celebration.  Here’s what I wrote in my journal that evening.

“It was a weird morning - felt restless, guilty, but the guilt wasn’t personal. Felt like I was getting close to something that wants to stay hidden.  I had weird dysfunctions of electronics, of my hearing aids, stuff falling. When I picked out the flowers and decided to buy them, I had tears well up. I almost burst into tears and would have if not in a store. Felt like my heart breaking open - like when I bought those hand-made expensive mittens for Mom - doing what love does, what love wants - like sometimes it just flows through and cracks a person (me) open. I experienced it, watched myself be curious as well. I choked up many times today, always related to Lovisa.”

I bought that lovely fall bouquet of flowers that was nestled in a bag decorated with the words ‘Be happy’ and ‘Gather’.   I also picked up a candle, a one-person sized apple pie, some donuts, and sprinkle-covered donut holes. With those, I set off, ready for a nice Día de los Muertos feast with the departed family.

When I got into Mattoon, thanks to GPS I easily found the cemetery.  I had an online map of the cemetery and before long I found the potter’s field - a large grassy area edged with old trees but mostly empty of grave markers.  The records said she was buried in row 8 grave 2, but I found nothing to indicate where that might be. A person walking their dog directed me to a large maintenance shed. There I met with a fellow who had access to all the up-to-date records, but he said the records to the potter’s field had been lost in a tornado in 1919. There was no way to know exactly where she is buried. Thus foiled, I returned to the potter’s field

My ancestor is buried here, somewhere, but where? ©Cynthia Edstrom 2022

.As I stood there wondering where she might be buried, I looked at the trees with wonder, considering which of them might have been here that day in April when she was buried.  What happened that no one had money for her burial? Was any family here for her burial? Had anyone cared for her while she was ill? What had happened to her husband and where were her many children when she died?

Spring of 1894 was a tragic one for the family.  Lovisa’s son, John Wesley Vandeventer died March 3^rd .  He was 49 and had lived in Paris Illinois almost 40 miles from Mattoon by today’s roads. Lovisa died 6 weeks later, on April 14 at the age of 78.  Then, three weeks later, her daughter Miranda (my 2x great grandmother) died at 51.  She had been living in North Okaw, 10 miles away on tiny back roads even today, a good day’s ride by horse. How did family get the news of these deaths? What happened that so many died in the span of two months? Smallpox, diphtheria, typhus, influenza?

One month later, my great-grandmother Minnie, now motherless at 19, and having lost her grandmother and uncle, married my great-grandfather. Had they already planned to marry or was this, as seems likely to me, a wedding done out of grief and perhaps a bit of desperation? Maybe she needed to escape the likely expectation to run her father’s house with her mother gone. I can only speculate. Minnie, her husband, and her first seven children would stay in North Okaw until the rest of the older generation died. Then they would pack up and move 280+ miles away to Dalton, Missouri in 1907, where my grandma was born. Were they trying to leave their grief and loss behind? Or were there simply better opportunities in Missouri? I don’t know and they didn’t tell us, but they kept moving until they finally settled in Columbia, Missouri, in 1923. My mother would be born there ten years later.

Families throughout time have dealt with tragedy and loss, just like my people did. There’s so much I didn’t know as I stood in that cemetery on that November day, much I still don’t know. Even the spelling of Lovisa’s name is uncertain.  Sometimes her name was spelled Louvecey, Louisa, Levica, Louvicia varying by who was doing the recording. Census takers didn’t seem to attend much to spelling, or perhaps my ancestor didn’t know how her name was spelled. Schooling was hard to access on the frontier.

Bringing my offering to the potter’s field, I wrote ‘Lovicia Tuttle VanDeventer’ on the bag, lit a candle, arranged the pie and donut, then sat as emotions flowed over me in waves.  The feelings were hard to describe - something like love, or like grief, all mixed up - for someone I’d never met. Regardless, I was choked up, tears flowing without explanation.  Perhaps, no one was able to grieve her when she died; maybe the ancestors waited for someone to return. That someone happened to be me.

Offering for ancestor Lovisa Tuttle Vandeventer, Dodge Grove Cemetery, Mattoon, Illinois ©Cynthia Edstrom 2022

I told her who I was through my tears.

“I am here…Cynthia, daughter of Sylvia, daughter of Vestana, daughter of Minnie, daughter of Miranda, daughter of Lovisa.  Your life mattered. Thank you. Because of your life, I am here.”

This recitation of my mother-line felt like an ancient ritual, as an ancient priestess of the Great Mother…something women once knew before our names were hidden in the structure of patriarchy, when the lineage of our mothers mattered. I spent time quietly there being with the feelings, the grief, the ancestral love, and remembrance, letting them wash over me. Then, I left the food offering and the flowers behind and returned to my hotel, feeling lighter and relieved like I had fulfilled a mission… at least in part. I called my cousin sharing what I’d found; we decided we’d get her a stone…once we decide how she wants her name spelled.

As I turned to head for home a few days later, I returned to the potter’s field for a farewell visit. Again, I felt overcome with emotion and the tears came. I felt guided to retrieve some of the flowers and the bag to take with me, to carry out a further pilgrimage. 

Why was I overcome with emotion at her burial site, but not the others?  I probably visited over 50 graves of various ancestors during my trip and no other affected me this way, not even the rows of babies lost and commemorated with stones by grieving parents (although I did spend evenings doggedly matching up those babies with their parents on ancestry.com). She was the only one left alone in a potter’s field, but I don’t know really. What I experienced remains a mystery.

Two days later I arrived at my grandmother’s and mother’s graves. They are buried in a cemetery near where I grew up.  I left a few of Lovisa’s flowers at each grave.  Once again, I felt this surge of emotion wash over me, reaching a crescendo of weeping at my mother’s grave. Yes, I miss my mom, but this didn’t feel like my personal grief.  No, the grief was beyond me, like something ancient that demanded expression. Grandma and Mom never met Lovisa and may not have even known her name.  However, without forgotten Lovisa, none of us would have lived. This little ritual of bringing the flowers ‘full circle’ felt somehow important, like it brought closure to something that had waited, untended for a long time.

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I can’t explain my experience of love and grief, of feeling as though the grief and loss my ancestors couldn’t express came flowing out through me. I still find the experience curious and surprising. Is it possible the emotions of generations lie dormant, awaiting an outlet? We know trauma is transmitted through the generations, why not grief and love? How much of what we carry really isn’t ours?

 Life on the Illinois frontier was rough, filled with loss, hardship, and hard physical labor. It required grit, determination, resilience, and a large measure of luck to survive.  If I were to meet Lovisa today, what would she think of my life? Likely she’d be horrified and overwhelmed, but I hope she’d also be proud. My Illinois ancestors adhered to strict versions of Christianity that dictated one’s proper place and behavior.  In exchange, the teachings of the church held those early communities together and gave those gritty lives meaning, a hope for something better, a more easeful afterlife and hope of reunion with those many who had died. Tolerance was not part of their philosophy. Had I been born then, my fate would have been similar - early marriage, lots of children, endless hard domestic labor, likely early widowhood.  If one was lucky, one’s children could take you in when tragedy or old age struck.  If not, well, one ended up alone, buried by the town in the potter’s field, like Lovisa.

Since my visit to my Illinois ancestors, I am so much more grateful for the life I have, and for the people who came before me. Even now as I write this, I can feel the waves of emotion arise. The grief and the love are big, much greater than me. Perhaps its expression was delayed for generations because there was too much work to be done to pause for grief or sadness. Survival is big work. I am glad they did the work. Because they lived, because someone named Lovisa Tuttle Vandeventer lived in the 1800s in the Illinois frontier, I am alive to write this to you now, my heart aglow with gratitude. This is nothing short of a miracle.

1. Other databases include my heritage.com and family search.org. DNA testing has also transformed people’s ability to discover information about their heritage and is available at ancestry.com, my heritage.com, 23andme.com, among others.

2. I want to acknowledge that for my ancestors to settle in Illinois, the Native American people were first forcibly, and violently removed from lands that had belonged to them for thousand of years, something we descendants of American colonists still need to make amends for. The area was also densely forested. My ancestors and other settlers set about deforesting the area, clearing the land for farming, something that I now consider an ecologic travesty. I doubt any of this occurred to these people who were trying to make their way in seemingly hostile environments.

3. Since I have no Mexican heritage, I recognize am only borrowing the idea of celebrating my ancestors on this day, while recognizing I do not have insight into the depth of meaning and nuances of this holiday.