Some families have all sorts of stories about "wacky" relatives, but not mine. Until now! It isn't much, but I'll take what I can get. Over Easter/Ostara weekend, I wanted to go in search of the cemetery where my maternal grandmother's family is buried. Through online census records, I uncovered the location of the church and the names. So my mom, my partner and I set off in the car, with GPS activated.
We found the rural Methodist church and its small cemetery just south of the county line. Thank goodness we didn't have hundreds of graves to search! There were several stones bearing my maternal grandmother's family name, and within just a minute or so we had found her parents and her paternal grandparents (theirs was one of the oldest graves, so they must have founded the church in the 19th century).
My mom then tells me that she remembers her mother's parents, Arthur and Ida, but they were already quite elderly at the time. Specifically, she remembers Arthur taking her and her siblings out into a field to show them how he found water with a dowsing rod. She said she remembers the stick moving around (she didn't say if they actually found water), but it certainly made an impression on her--and of course, it caught my attention!
Stories about old Southerners using a dowsing rod aren't all that odd, actually. Sure, maybe people were more superstitious back then, or it could be they were more open to things before science (and religion) educated the wonder right out of us. I wonder if great-grandpa Arthur had to keep it a secret from his Methodist brethren? But in the countryside, these sort of things were often tolerated as long as it didn't attract too much attention. Sometimes the dowser didn't even consider his "skill" all that special but more something fun to play around with and impress the children (like my mother).
Just one little story, but it's something!
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