Tatting

Last week I went to the cemetery where my father's mother and grandparents are buried. I hadn't been there in about 15 years. Shame on me. It was a very small cemetery surrounded by fields and woods. I was sure I could find the graves. You could look at every one of them in the cemetery in twenty minutes. Oh what the years have done to even this very rural place. The road is still gravel. The cemetery is still without a sign saying it's name, but it has expanded and had lots of graves added to the old part. I didn't remember the stone designs accurately and couldn't find them. I would have given up, but my friend Shirley, who went with me, said no way. We called and went to the township office to look at the plait map. The had put the names on computer but couldn't find my family. My great-grandparents were buried in 1906 and 1933 but my grandmother was buried in 1979. They could find none of them but I knew they were there. Finally she looked through all the "W" names and found a last name with the great-grandparents first names. She showed me the original hand written book from which the names were taken and it seemed very wrong too. When I finally found the grave markers, the name was correct. The only record the township had was of who bought the original plots. When that name had been put in incorrectly, it was hopeless. Funny system. Oh, well, I got it corrected. And I discovered that in 1906 four grave sites had been purchased. One was still empty. I asked how I could claim it. I'm an only child, as was my father, so there could be no conflict as to inheritance of it. So I came home to find death certificates and obituaries to send to the township clerk. They also wanted as much family history as I could provide. I spent a couple hours at my local senior center using their computer program. I found my great-great- grandparents on the 1860 census. They were born in 1801 and 1822 and were living in the area in 1860 with their five children. I want to go spend some more time on that computer to see what else I might find. Maybe next week. I have dragged out the boxes of family information and treasures. I definitely come from a line of pack rats. I've tackled the job of trying to put it all into some kind of family book several times, but I am determine to finish it this time. I kept thinking I would gather more information first. Now I'm just going to organize what I have into a loose leaf notebook that can be updated later. Today I started sorting things into individual files. My mother's is large and will probably be the last one I do. I found some cards she made using her tatting skills. I hope you can enlarge the pic so you can see it. I never learned how to tat. Do any of you know how?