2026, Family, Gatherings, History, Theatre, Uncategorized

Tales From The Grave

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On Saturday, the Rock County Historical Society hosted a program of reenactments of the lives of several people buried in Rock County. One was that of a priest, Father Francis Sampson, buried in Luverne’s Catholic Cemetery. He was known as the Paratrooper Padre, and served as a chaplain with the 101st Screaming Eagles in WWII. He parachuted into Normandy on D-day and was the guy who alerted the top brass that a young soldier had lost several brothers in other engagements and since he was the last of the brothers he should be sent home to their mother. Hence Saving Private Ryan, the movie.

Another compelling story was that of a young woman, Captain Lenore Hansen, from Hills (about 15 miles from Luverne and buried in the Hills Cemetery) who was one of the first women allowed to enlist into the Marines in 1945. She worked with the Navaho Code Talkers. She was noted for her really good memory, and memorized over 200 Navaho words, and was involved in creating English words for which there were no counterparts in Navaho. Thus, the Navaho words for Iron and fish were combined to represent “submarine”. She never told her family what she had done in the war. She became a special education teacher in Rochester, MN. She is said to have not told her family about what she did in the war since it was considered classified information.

I think it would be really fun to be a reenactor in these scenarios. It is really wonderful to know about the people who lived and are buried in this country. I look forward to see who they find for next year’s Tales From The Grave. Although he is buried in Pipestone County, it would be fun to see a reenactor present my great grandfather who was a grenadier in the Prussian army and who fled Germany in 1914 after being found out by the authorities to be smuggling butter on the Hamburg wharves with his dray company.

Know any women veterans? Who of your ancestors would you like to present or see presented in a historical reenactment?

51 thoughts on “Tales From The Grave”

  1. We have a similar event each fall at various gravesites at our Woodlawn Cemetery. There are 3-4 vignettes about some person/event in Winona’s past – ours are not centered around the military.

    Not a re-enactment, but our trip to France in 2015 was due to the installation of a new plaque to honor the American airmen who had basically helped save the village of St. Pere en Retz in 1943. My mother’s brother was among those honored. I’ll see if I can find the link to the blog post I wrote about that…

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  2. My 10th grandfather, Jonathan Fairbanks, came to Massachusetts from England in 1633. He built a timber frame house that stands to this day in Dedham, Massachusetts. The house remained in the Fairbanks family for 8 generations, 269 years.
    My 9th grandfather, Jonas, was killed in February 1676 during a native American raid on Lancaster, Massachusetts as part of King Phillips War.
    His son (my 8th grandfather)Captain Jabez Fairbanks, grew up to become a noteworthy scout against the tribes.
    Any one of these grandfathers during that time period would be interesting to see re-enacted or just the house.

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    2. Oh yes, our 6 degree’s of seperation. Kelly’s Uncles Mother was a Fairbanks. We’ve got a book with a picture of that house. (The book is a historical book about the customs, and everyday life, so the reference to the house is about it being the first of it’s stylein MA. Or maybe even the colonies.)

      No military connections in my immediate family. Uncles and BiL’s that served, and a nephew.

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      2. My great ×3 grandfather, William,(Not the actor!)was father to Caroline Fairbanks. It’s possible Kelly’s uncle was a sibling to my great, great grandmother.

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    3. Wes, we surely had ancestors who knew each other. I had a grandfather who also was in King Phillips war. I agree that those folks would be interesting re-enactments.
      When you look at that Puritan population it stands out how small the population was. Both of my parents are descended from the same Puritan, Edward Garfield–my father from his daughter and my mother from his son.

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      1. Grandpa x10, Jonathan, didn’t sign on to Dedham’s Puritan church until later in life. I believe that any religiousness he professed was to expedite property gains.

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      2. My 9th Grandfather on the paternal side of my mother, Robert Tucker, built his house in Milton, Massachusetts in 1670. The house still stands although it has been moved. Milton is less than 5 miles from Dedham.
        Both Great x Grandfathers could known each other.

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      1. Way cool! If there was a church ceremony, some Fairbanks would have been there. However, Grandpa x 10 resisted inclusion in Dedham’s Puritan church roster for many years.

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  3. I don’t think I know any women veterans but I suppose it’s possible.

    I don’t know near as much about my ancestors as some of the baboons, but those that I know, especially some of the women, lived good lives, but I can’t think of any thing that they were involved in that wouldn’t make a decent reenactment.

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  4. What struck me as I read your opening sentence, Renee, is that even after death we’re segregated. You mention Luverne’s Catholic Cemetery, is there a Jewish and a Lutheran one as well? I’m sure there are cemeteries for Black folks, which makes me wonder what current practices are for immigrant populations such as the Hmong, Chinese, and Somali? How about the indigenous people of the United States?

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    1. My great great grandmother is buried in Prairie Island cemetery, where many Native American members of the Prairie Island community are also buried.

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    2. I wonder if those who had separate “denominational” cemeteries wasn’t mainly a function of burying folks “in the churchyard” or, in some cases, specially consecrated ground. Since, in most cases in American history, there were people without church connections everywhere, there must have been a “town burying ground” somewhere in the area. It’s entirely possible, too, that when cities like Jersey City, NJ, widened roads that necessitated moving graves to a municipal site from a church one, arrangements were made.

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    3. There is a Vietnamese section of the cemetery on the East Side of St Paul (can’t recall the name of it right now). We discovered it when the s&h was learning to drive. It’s very colorful.

      In my mom’s hometown, the cemetery is owned by the Missouri Synod Lutheran church. When you enter the “new” cemetery, the large Lutheran part is to the left, but there’s a little Catholic part on the right side of the road that is older and has headstones that say the deceased were born in County Kerry and such. My mother remembered that as a child, if you so much as looked over there, that was your one way ticket straight to hell.

      When I was a child there were still metalwork memorials that always fascinated me. By the time I went there w/ the s&h, those were all gone.

      When the s&h was a toddler, we went to the town annual celebration, that always included a church service. We attended the first Catholic mass that had been held there in over a hundred years.

      I’m sure the people there will tell you that their ancestors came to this country “legally” and learned to speak English immediately. They are lying. I plenty of people there who were born here whose English was pretty spotty.

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      1. Spillville, Iowa, about ten miles from Decorah, had a heavy Czech population. The cemetery there is distinctive with a lot of metal markers.

        I have a psalm book that belonged to my paternal grandmother, who was born in North Dakota in 1903 but grew up in the predominantly Scandinavian town of Barrett in northwest Minnesota. Her father was Swedish, her mother the child of Norwegian immigrants. The book is in Norwegian, which strongly suggests she spoke that language as a girl, though I never knew her to do so in my lifetime.

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    4. There is one Catholic cemetery in Rochester. it seems to me it’s almost full. I’m not sure what the long range plans are.
      The cemtery close to us has a section for Muslims, a pet cemtery section, and there are some Hmong graves mixed in with the other areas.
      Everyone needs to diversify…

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      1. It may be that cemeteries in the future are going to have to rely on the cultural traditions of immigrants that still favor burial. I have ownership of a pair of plots in the cemetery where my parents, my grandfather, and a couple of other relatives are buried. I have no interest in being buried there or buried anywhere. I’ve tried over the years to sell those plots at a steep discount from what they originally cost and I’ve gotten no response whatsoever.
        Burial is so passe.

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        1. I know that I’ve mentioned before that the last time I visited Stubbekøbing I spent some time meandering through the town’s cemetery. I was shocked to discover that old family grave sites and grave stones had been removed. Many, many graves that I visited regularly throughout my childhood, simply gone. It is no longer possible for people like my uncle Ove, who was an avid researcher of his family’s ancestors, to visit and photograph their final resting place.

          I understand the logistics of it, but somehow removing old grave stones doesn’t seem like the right solution to me. But I think Bill is right, funerals are a thing of the past.

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  5. I know most of my ancestors up to ggg grandparents and I’ve been to the graves of all those buried in America but I know almost nothing of the lives of any of them. What would the reenactors reenact?

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    1. We’ve been at the local historical society, and looked up our dead relatives. Not much there. They just kept their heads down and worked hard I guess.
      Their is some history of my maternal Great grandparents over in Wisconsin. The Egglers had money evidently. “Rich Farmers” so it was said. They donated land for a church and cemetery. And when Grandma Betz married Grandpa Eggler, the Betz family wasn’t pleased. GGrandma Betz threw all their stuff in a ditch and left in a huff. (rumor has it. I don’t know the details). 🙂
      Now that might be fun to re-enact!

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  6. I would dearly love to know more about my great-great grandfather who served in the Kaiser’s army as a young man and was on the casualty lists a cousin found online.

    He immigrated and raised a family in Minnesota. He died of a heart attack when on his way to the fishing pond with a couple of neighbor boys when he has an old man. I’ve always wondered about him.

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      1. A friend of mine wrote and self-published a personal memoir. In the book she describes the night she met her second husband, the love of her life. The book is essentially about their marriage until his untimely death from Legionnaire’s Disease contracted on a cruise ship.

        I’m mentioned in it because I was one of the women who was with her the night Mr. Wonderful swept her off her feet.

        In the book she describes me as the globetrotting, multilingual daughter of a sea captain. I protested and told her he was just a regular seaman, part of the crew on various big freighters, and that my globetrotting was extremely limited, but she thought no harm was done in giving us both a little extra pizzazz.

        In retrospect, perhaps my enhanced status in the book was to emphasize that Mr. Wonderful chose her despite stiff competition? Who knows?

        Fortunately, no one will ever know it is me that she was referring to me. Besides, the number of people who will ever read that book is extremely limited.

        If nothing else, it made me question how much else in the book was a gross exaggeration of the facts.

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  7. My friend, Helen, just yesterday came back from a long weekend in New Orleans where she attended the annual convention of the American Rosie the Riveter Association. For a quite few years now, she has traveled around the country interviewing Rosies, and, as a writer for ARRA, documented their stories. (https://sites.rootsweb.com/~usarra/)

    Quite naturally, attendance at the annual Rosies convention has declined in recent years due to the dwindling Rosies population. At this year’s meeting in New Orleans there were thirty-one Rosies, all of them well into their nineties, even a couple over 100 years old.

    One of the featured attractions of this year’s convention was a special tour for Rosies of The National World War II Museum. At the entrance to the museum each guest was given a replica of a soldier’s dog tag. That dog tag activated various displays throughout the exhibit to give a personal story of battles or events that particular soldier was involved in.

    I don’t have a good understanding, as yet, of how that worked, but it sounds intriguing to me. I spoke briefly with Helen yesterday as she was sitting in the train they call The City of New Orleans as it was rumbling northward toward Chicago.

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  9. My Great Great Grandfather, Frederick Christian Hess, who fought on Sherman’s March to the Sea during the Civil War, has been re-enacted many times, often by several cousins.
    I would love to see the Irish child, Thomas Antrim, brought to life. He was taken in 1560 by the English Army to pay his parents’ taxes. He was placed on an English Estate as a servant. The brutality of that is appalling. He did have a family. He sent his son to America in the 1620s when he met Colleen O’shea on the boat and married her. They were the foundation of the Antrim family in the USA. “Antrim” is a County in Northern Ireland which is where the last name originated.

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  10. my dads family came from ireland (kerry cork claire and dingle, my moms from anashanabee in minnesota, poland and ulstermy daughter married a kosovo guy my son like me married into the german bloodline. my grand kids are mutts

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  11. All Trail Baboons are related. The crazy uncle is Jim Ed Poole.
    The Father is Dale The Con.
    Crazy aunts are VS and somebody from North Dakota.

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  12. One thing I learned at the Minnesota Hisotory Center’s Julia Child exhibit is that she was barred from joining the WAVES or the WACS during WWII because she was 6 feet 2 inches tall, and deemed too tall to fit comfortably into the uniforms and quarters provided for the women.

    A qualified man who was 6 foot 2 would have been accepted into any branch of the military.

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    3. To be fair (ahem!), the armed services apparently have their restrictions. The reason given for Barron T not enlisting is that he’s too tall.

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  13. The story about my father’s German immigrant family was that when they learned WWI was over, they threw a big shindig where everyone drank lots of beer and had a grand old time. They were extremely disappointed the next day when they found out that Germany had lost the war. They felt that the money used to buy all that beer had been squandered.

    The story might be apocryphal. Who learns that a war has ended and doesn’t trouble to find out who won till the next day? But a reenactment could be fun.

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