Although I've never lived in Webster County I will be buried there alongside six generations of my ancestors at Mount Lebanon Baptist Church Cemetery on KY Hwy. 132, about halfway between Dixon and Sebree. My dad grew up on a farm across the road from the church and most of his ancestors worshipped there all their lives. You can view the Mount Lebanon Cemetery listings online. Webster County Historical and Genealogical Society mapped the cemetery some years back and gave me permission to put the listing online. Since that time Marian and Amy Dunn have photographed the headstones at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery and we have those online also.

Every summer my grandparents Willie Bluff Jones and Margie Marks Jones, invited their grandkids to spend a week on the farm with them. This was the same farm where my dad grew up but not the same farmhouse. The new house was built after 1940; it is a frame bungalow with a front porch that faces the highway. It sits on a small hill and you can drive right up into the side yard between the barn and the house. Later improvements included indoor plumbing, a washhouse, smokehouse, and a playhouse. The house where my dad and his brothers and sister had been raised was called "the old place" by family members, and it was back a dirt road that was often impassable when it rained. When the grown children came back home to visit at the old place they often had to park their cars on the side of the highway, put on boots and walk the half mile or so to the house. We have a picture of me, the first grandchild, perched daintily atop my Uncle Bud Lenfers' shoulders during one of these muddy walks.

I have no memory of the old place, except that we would sometimes walk there with our grandparents on a nostalgia trip. It was a small house, I remember, because their family was tiny compared to those of most of Grandma's Marks relatives. Their children numbered only four; my dad was the oldest; there were two brothers just a few years younger than him and then finally a baby sister. Grandma herself had come from a family of twelve children, but Granddaddy had been one of only three children. At one time my Grandmother had fifty-one Marks first cousins living in Webster County. I spoke with one of them, Alton Adams, at the Marks family reunion in October 1995; he was a real pleasure to visit with - his memory was fine and he had a sparkle in his eyes. My mother had seen Alton earlier that same week - he was lifting a lawn mower out of his pickup truck at the cemetery; he wanted to spruce up the family gravesites before the reunion. Alton Adams died in December 1999 at age 94, and his obituary can be read online.

Alton told me a story about my great-granddaddy Jack Jones that I had never heard - how he could catch a catfish from the depths of Deer Creek with his bare hands; they called it "grabbling" and Jack Jones was an expert at it. Jack Jones was a relative newcomer to Webster County; he came there from Minnesota and married Mary Jane Bridwell in 1893, shortly after his arrival. Jack Jones' background is very much a mystery but we believe his parents came to the US from Wales. At any rate, in Webster County he was known as "Minnesota Jack" Jones.

Mary Jane Bridwell's family had been in Webster County since before it became a county in 1860. The land my grandparents farmed came down to them through the Bridwell family; it was purchased in 1860 by Mary Jane's widowed grandmother from Bullitt County, Martha "Patsy" Briscoe Bridwell Jewell, with money realized from the sale of her late husband's farm, and the new land was earmarked for the heirs of Fielding Bridwell. Locals often refer to this property as Bridwell Hills. It is a beautiful spot with lots of wooded land and rolling hills. Sitting on the front porch you can look across the road at the patchwork acres of bottom land, some of it was still farmed by my uncle Nelson Jones until he died in 1999. Uncle Nelson and his wife lived in the house where my Grandma was born in 1895. After Grandma Jones died in 1991 Nelson's son Alan bought Grandma's land. Alan isn't a farmer - he's a city boy - but he couldn't bear for the land to leave the family. My dad's only sister felt the same way and insisted she be allowed to purchase the piece of land that was the site of "the old place" where she had grown up with her three brothers.

The summer visits I recall took place in the late 1940's and early 1950's; there were nine of us cousins, mostly city kids. I was the oldest of the bunch. Grandma was always teased by the grocer about all the milk she would buy when the grandkids visited. They had cows but our city taste buds just couldn't handle drinking fresh cows' milk - it tasted funny to us. So when we visited Grandma bought milk at the grocery store.

I remember blackberry-picking expeditions where we wound up with more chigger bites than blackberries. Grandma would paint our bites with colored nail polish to keep us from scratching them; what a polka-dot fashion statement we Jones cousins made! We fished in the man-made lake at the top of the hill behind the house. I once snagged a huge turtle that startled me so badly I let my pole be drug into the lake.

Granddaddy kept Tony the Pony for the grandkids to ride when they were there. Once Tony ran under the clothesline with cousin Betty Kay Shelton aboard, causing her to take quite a spill. Another time the cousins locked Betty Kay in the outhouse and she climbed out the top and had another fall. I think she broke a bone in her arm but I could be wrong.

Late mornings Grandma would pack up some food and we would join Granddaddy, who had been at work in the bottoms since sunup. We trudged along behind Grandma, who always wore her sunbonnet when she was outdoors, helping carry food and drink. When we arrived at the field we would sit under a tree while Granddaddy had his noontime rest and we all ate together. He would remove his old straw hat and pull out a kerchief to wipe his brow before he ate. When Granddaddy removed his hat he had the most remarkable suntan line I've ever seen; below his hatline his face was as dark as an Indian but the skin above it was creamy white and smooth. He always wore overalls and a long-sleeved shirt to protect himself from the sun, no matter how hot the weather. I remember thinking the mules enjoyed the break almost as much as Granddaddy except they didn't get to eat.

When his children were young Granddaddy Jones worked in the coal mines in addition to his farming chores. There were many seams of coal on his property and in most of them he had to work on his hands and knees to remove the coal. My sister still has some of the hand tools he used in his mining work. We also have the lasts he used when he repaired his children's shoes. During several winters Grandma and Granddaddy Jones moved to a house in Dixon so their children could go to school every day. Granddaddy went back and forth to the farm daily to take care of the animals unless a neighbor was able to tend to them.

Grandma Jones was a great cook and she always prepared a meal with the idea that others might drop by to enjoy it with them. I remember how easily she would flour and fry up a couple of chickens in lard, using her cast iron skillet. I think the lard was the secret because I have never been able to fix good fried chicken; I'm not even sure if you can still buy lard. Her biscuits were mixed by hand in her wooden dough bowl and they were delicious. Banana pudding and chocolate pie were her most popular desserts, although I also remember a delicious raisin pie she made that I've been unable to duplicate. In her later years Grandma had a prized collection of salt and pepper shakers. Her children gave them to her as gifts and then people started bringing them to her when they traveled and soon she had amassed an untold number of salt and pepper shakers.

Grandma Jones was also an excellent quilter and spent many an afternoon at the quilting frame with her friends from church. My grandma is standing on the right in the photo, with Mt. Lebanon Church Cemetery in the background. Each grandchild was given a quilt when he or she married and I have managed to gather a few extras. Several years ago I went through a bad spell of illness and there was nothing more comforting than curling up on the couch with my favorite quilt made by Grandmother Jones.

If the cousins got bored during the afternoon, Grandma would put us to work stringing beans or killing flies or something equally important. We were also a baseball-playing family and the side yard was a great place for a baseball game. If it rained we would go to the attic and go through the treasures there - old clothes for playing dress-up, books and old pictures to pore over, and, best of all, the old victrola with the "Abba Dabba Honeymoon" record.

One summer there were baby piglets and Granddaddy let us hold them; they looked so adorable that I couldn't wait to get my hands on them but their little bellies turned out to be as hard as rocks and they were not soft and cuddly at all.

Several times the cousins' visit coincided with the church's annual revival meeting. We were used to city churches and they were nothing like Mount Lebanon Baptist Church, where the preacher would come down from the pulpit and prowl through the congregation looking for souls to save. Once I thought he was looking directly at me and I remember shaking my head and hiding my face in Grandma's shoulder. Grandma's third great grandfather had been the Rev. John Marks, who preached in the Ketoctin District in Loudoun County VA from 1750-1788. And one of her second great grandfathers had been Williamson Crews, who was a Baptist lay preacher in neighboring Henderson County for many years during the 1800's. I wish I had discovered her preacher ancestors before Grandma died; she was a good Christian woman and I know she would have been so proud of them.

Granddaddy Jones owned a Model-T Ford, which he called the T-Model. He stood in front of the car to crank it up and when the engine would catch and turn over we would all squeal like the piglets and the scramble would begin for the prized positions in the rumble seat and then we would go for a ride along the area backroads. This ride was the highlight of the entire visit for me. In 1994 I rode along some of those same roads with a Marks cousin I have met since I started doing genealogy; Pearlene Melton Johnson had lived right down the road from my grandparents during many of her growing-up years and she is much more familiar with the area than me. Pearlene pointed out homes to me that I hadn't seen for nearly 50 years, because on the rare occasions now when we get to Webster County, we seldom get off the main roads. It was mostly a sad sight; many of the old buildings are falling down and are being reclaimed by the fields and woods.

Many evenings relatives would drop by during the cousins' visit; they wanted to see how Margie and Willie's grandkids had grown during the last twelve months. The people they talked about had names that sounded strange to our ears - like Grandma's Aunt Ura Deller Marks who married Uncle Starl Shelton, Aunt Mealie Marks who married Louis A. Melton, Grandma's sister Georgie Marks who married Floyd "Battle" Gentry, Oval "Toad" Jones, the neighbor across the road but no relation to our Jones family. As darkness fell the sound of the adults' voices in conversation would lull us to sleepiness. We slept on the floor in pallets and if the floor felt hard to my city-girl bones I don't remember it.

At the end of the week our parents would come for us and we would return to the city, chigger bites and all, babbling about our week of adventures in the country.

Grandmother Jones outlived Granddaddy by twenty-three years and she stayed on the farm alone during most of that time. When she was 86 years old, she received a bad burn on her leg helping a neighbor fight a fire in his field. About two weeks later, I went with my aunt to take Grandma to the doctor so he could check the healing process. After we saw the doctor Grandma wanted go shopping for a new sofa while she was in town. We visited several stores before she found a sofa she liked, and while she was making the delivery arrangements, my aunt and I gratefully sat down nearby and fanned ourselves; we agreed Grandma could still outdo either of us when she was having a good day. Margie Jane Marks Jones lived one month past her 96th birthday.

My husband and I have an even smaller family than did my parents and grandparents; we have only one child, a son, and he and his wife have two sons. For the past 15 years we have taken each of the boys for a week in the summer and tried to show them a good time. It's not the same as having a whole bunch of cousins to play with but we think it gives them an insight into the way we live our lives, and we hope it has given them the strength that comes from knowing who you are and where you came from. Note: Since I wrote this reminiscence in 1996, the two grandsons have grown up; one of them is currently a sophomore in college and the other has graduated from college, spent six months in Iraq and now has four-year-old twin sons of his own. Photos online

I got into genealogy late in my life. When I think of those evenings we spent on that front porch in Webster County with all those relatives I wish I could have back a fraction of that time so I could sit down with each of them and ask them to tell me who they remembered and what they remembered and the places they remembered. But I was young and I didn't understand. Now I understand. And that's why I do this.

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