Looking into my family tree

While my mother was in town visiting
We had decided that we should take myself and my siblings up to look for our Grandfathers & Great-Aunt Mae's grave
My mother wasn't even exactly sure what cemetry he was buried in but she thought she knew.
The trip to the graveyard was a real interesting trip LOL
We knew it was in Niagara Falls , Ontario , Canada.
As my fathers side of the family is ALL Canadian.
We got there and the offices are closed on saturdays ,
I was totally susprised by that.
so there was no one to guide us or even look up to see if the graves were in this cemetery.
My mothers memory was our best shot ( and not much of one)
she remembered it being a "reddish stone close to the road"
So we drove around some of us watching one side of the roadways and the rest watching the other LOL.

We found a few "Misener"s and a couple "Misner"s but none were "our" Miseners ,
we'd hop out of the van everytime we saw a Misener or a Biggar ( cousins) LOL
Our family started with 4 of seven brothers coming to Ontario in 1777,
being loyal to the English king these recent German mercenaries/immigrants decided to move to Canada
rather than stay in NJ and take part in the revolution.
So the brothers spread out across Canada and were fairly prolific , especially in southern ontario.
We drove around the cemetery for over 1-1/2 hours and had just about reached the end of the place
when I spotted a Misener stone about 50 yards off the road and we stopped .
This was actually the last section to check and we lucked out.
It sure wasn't reddish but it was the right one ,
the funniest thing was , when I parked at the offices and went to check the door ,
we were only 30 yards from the grave but the name wouldn't have been visible even if we had looked.

So I took a lot of pics of it and other graves while we were there ,
the Canadians have some interesting traditions as far as the way they keep their graves there.
Stuff they would never let you do here in Buffalo are done all over that cemetery.
A lot of the graves are decorated
Animals , dolls , lights ,little fences , picture frames , banners -all sorts of stuff
I took some pictures of ones I liked and a couple I thought were a bit "overdone" someday I'll post those up at the site.

So after the graveyard we stopped for lunch,
After lunch we headed off to look for the "old homestead"
I hadn't been there since 1969 and
was sure the farm would have been cut up and turned into a housing development ,
being it was only a 15 minute drive to the actual Niagara Falls.
But as we turned onto the road , we found it to look almost the exact same as it did 40 years ago.
The "street" was only 2 "blocks" long and we drove up and down it trying to figure out where it was.
There were 2 barns on the street both with silos ( which ours didn't have) so I figured that was it ,
none of the other buildings looked right either on them from the street.
The main landmark I was looking for was a small creek that ran under the street but we found two of them LOL

There was an old "abandoned" driveway , overgrown with weeds that I thought was spaced about right from the creek across from the one property with a barn on it.
It was raining at this point but I got out and went down the path and took some pictures of the fields that were obviously returning to nature filled with years of scrub brush.
But I couldn't reconize any of the terain back there.
As I was walking back to the van a pickup truck stopped behind where I parked and
a late 40s aged guy asked me what I was doing.
It turned out his father owned the land.
When I explained about looking for the "family farm" , the guy started laughing.
He said "the one owned by Mae" , it turned out our farm was the one across the street,
the barn was the original but a silo was added soon after the new owner bought it.
He told me he could remember my great aunt giving him homemade cookies and pies when he was really small,
and he said he did remember my family coming over to visit her.
He still lived on his fathers land and said he was good friends with the person who bought the farm from our family.
The "new " owner wasn't there but he walked around the property with us for a while.
A few of the "out" buildings were still there but you couldn't see them from the street.
The original house was taken down and a brick home built near the spot.
The walls from parts of the original house and the beams were used to build a large shed to park tractors and farm equipement in behind the barn.

So I gave him my card and he said his father would love to talk to me about my great aunt as he , I guess , was really close to her.
Plus he said he was sure the guy living on the farm would be interested too ,
so it looks like my one sister and I will be taking another trip up there in the future.
Hopefully it will be a better day weather wise and I can shoot more with out getting soaking wet LOL.

By the time I got home , we had been gone for about 7 hours ,
the trip and the rain took its toll on me and I was at a solid 9 pain wise by the time we got home.
I couldn't even download the pics last night but have been working on them today and will have them up at my website tonight