Sentimental Sunday - The Haddam Neck Fair

I am feeling very Sentimental today.  Yesterday Donald & I went to the Haddam Neck Fair in Haddam Neck, CT, something that I did with my parents and my father's parents when I was a child.

Labor Day 1972

Also Labor Day 1972

I hadn't been to the fair in many years, but Donald & I were looking for something relatively inexpensive to do last year and I thought of this and we obviously had a great time because we went again this year.

Walking from the parking field to the tractor pulling ring it almost seemed as if I had stepped back in time.  It looked as though nothing had changed from the 70s until I saw the ATM tent and the Tai food vendor.   Even so, it still feels like a slice of another time.

This was the 103rd year of the Haddam Neck Fair which runs from Friday afternoon through Monday night every Labor Day weekend.  Next year I want to go on Labor Day as we did when I was young and see the antique tractor pull instead of the modified tractors.

Missing from the old days was the volunteer firefighter's dunk tank and pie-in-the-face fundraisers which my father loved to try his hand at, but a wonderful newer addition is a church that fundraises barbequing half chickens over a huge pit served with the sweetest, juiciest corn I've ever had, no condiments necessary.

Due to scanner issues, I don't have any pictures of the five of us at the fair that I can share, but here is one I took of my parents and grandparents in my bedroom at our old house (click to enlarge if your eyes can handle my totally 70s wallpaper!).

Getting to Haddam Neck from Long Island means going through Middletown, home of Wesleyan University, where my grandparents lived from the time I was born until they died and where they are buried, at Indian Hill Cemetery, adjacent to the Wesleyan campus.

Both my father and grandfather went to Wesleyan, and my grandfather spent the last twenty years of his career there, as Vice President of Business Affairs.  So the whole town is like a trip down memory lane and even driving through it makes me sentimental.

When we visited the cemetery last year, we found my grandparents headstone tipped over.  The cemetery management took care of the issue right away. We went back yesterday and took these photos.

Click on the last photo to see the view from their plot, it really is spectacular in person.

It can be hard to revisit places like this when three of the four people you shared them with are gone (my father died in 2005) but we made new memories, and we will definitely keep going back.

Have a wonderful Labor Day Weekend!

Wednesday's Child - Benjamin and Norman Parker Smith

Since this is my first time participating in this prompt, I just want to let you know up front that I'm going a bit "outside the box" because this post is about a search for headstones, rather than the finding.

Benjamin and Norman Parker were the first and fifth born son's, respectively, of my great-grandparents, George Robert and Isabella Frances Parker Smith.

Benjamin was born in 1889 and Norman in 1903, both died in the same year they were born.

When Benjamin (named, as was the convention of the time, after his paternal grandfather) was born, George and Isabella had lost a stillborn son and had a daughter who was almost two years old.  They were living in Buckingham, Quebec with Isabella's parents.

When Norman was born the growing family, which now consisted of two girls and three boys, was living on the other side of Quebec in Thetford Mines.  I wonder how hard it was for my great-grandmother to leave her baby's grave so far away.

I only know of Benjamin and Norman through some old photocopies from the family bible.  I don't know how they died or where they are buried.  Benjamin is not buried with his grandparents in Buckingham, and Norman is not buried in Thetford Mines, that I can find, nor is he buried with his parents in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

I know that many children were buried without headstones at the time that these babies died, but I would dearly love to find Benjamin and Norman if at all possible.  This little mystery is really the thing that pushed me from just cataloguing what I know into doing my own research.

Perhaps someday the cemeteries where they rest will be catalogued by a fellow family historian and I will find them on Find A Grave, Interment.net, BillionGraves or some site as yet unknown to me.  Perhaps I will stumble on them myself while cataloguing headstones on a trip north.

In any case, Benjamin and Norman have not been forgotten.  I think of them often in the course of my research.