On our last day in Tennessee...a few of us drove to the town where my mom and all of her siblings were born. We saw the site of the house they lived in...the cemetery plot (owned by the Buchanan family - mysteriously pronounced as "Buck-hannon") where my great-grandparents and the toddler girl my grandparents' lost are buried.
My uncle J. told us a lot about how life was then, showed us the house our great-aunt lived and died in, and took us into a small cave where he and the bros. used to play or hide from their dad when they were in trouble...and we visited the Irish cemetery where some other relatives are buried -- it is high on a hill at the south edge of town -- big oak and mimosa trees, overgrown and beautiful. I took a lot of pictures there and will post some when I get them developed.
We also went into the old, mostly abandoned main street of town to a hotel where my grandmother witnessed a murder in 1937. She had gone down to make arrangements for work and was coming down a back staircase, heard a shot, and saw a man on the lower landing leaning over someone with a gun. Another man came up behind her and said something like "you saw me and now I have to kill you too". Somehow, my grandmother managed to get away from the guy, which was lucky for her because the killers holed up in the hotel for almost the whole afternoon and killed three of their hostages before the sheriff shot one of them in the head. The uncle who told us this story has a tendency to exaggerate so I am not sure how much of it is true, but it was entertaining to hear...
On our drive back to Illinois we stopped in the small cemetery in Danville Kentucky where my mom's parents are buried. She had not been back to their grave in almost 30 years and was understandably overcome for a little while... My brother and I helped clear off the gravestone and left some flowers and then wandered off to leave my mom and her brothers to talk.