Life these days can be overwhelming between trying to keep your head above the water financially and dealing with the plague going around… it’s becoming increasingly difficult to take a break and get back in touch with what’s really important. And so here I am once again inspiring someone else to solve an old mystery and mark off something on their bucket list – you know take an adventure and learn something, live.

It had started off as a mild curiosity a week ago. Basically we were talking about a big gap in my travel companion’s family tree that seems to just end with his great-great-great-great-great grandfather who fought in the Civil War. Somehow it was known that he was buried in Springfield Maine. I had to go up to Maine anyway so I figured why not take a little detour to satiate curiosity?

And so we gathered some charcoal and a large sketch pad for a rubbing, woke up early, and headed out to the tiny village of Springfield. It would be a two hour drive and as usual I did not have the exact address of the cemetery because it wasn’t around any houses and cemeteries don’t have their own address. Initially I even got the road wrong. I drove out there and was greeted not with the village I was expecting but instead a vast expanse of dirt road that led us absolutely nowhere.

We decided to redirect towards the town office thinking that perhaps they would have some old records or something of interest. We ended up in the center of town which had a few of the usual buildings but no town office was in sight. We decided to stop at the post office and ask for directions. The post office was TINY. There appeared to be one parking space, taken, and the inside waiting area for a queue could only comfortably fit two people. The clerk there looked at us like we’d just landed from Mars, which I am sure we looked like with both of us sporting unnaturally colored hair. She said he town office was across the road behind the little café. Basically we could hit it with a rock if we tried.

I drove over and found it. It was a refurbished hunting cabin, no parking lot, no sign at the road, and yes, hiding behind another tiny building that was apparently a café. There was a sign out front that said there was only to be one person in there at a time which could be because of Corona or equally because it was only big enough for one person to be inside in the first place. I waited outside for a few minutes. Basically, the women in there directed us to the town’s unofficial genealogist – a woman working across the street at the Smith’s general store. Smith’s aye? I am supposed to be related to the Smiths in these parts… somehow…

Suddenly it was like being in an episode of Northern Exposure. There was nothing about the developing scene that wasn’t terrifically cliché. The general store was again, tiny, with just two gas pumps outside that looked like they were installed in the 1950’s when road trips were the height of entertainment. Inside we found a solitary woman working who turned out to be the person we were looking for. She lit right up when we started asking about her work. She’d been archiving the local cemeteries since 1990 and had already written up as many family trees as she could using information from these cemeteries. She instantly recognized the graves we were asking about, likely due to their odd first names: Liberty and Christopher Columbus. She directed us to where the cemetery was as well as where those particular graves were. She revealed that Christopher Columbus was Samuel’s father which filled in a blank for at least one generation more. She had more information in a locally created book of Spauldings and promised to send a copy. This was wild.

So after this we continued down the road where over the hill we came across Bog Road which contained the South Springfield Cemetery. It was a small cemetery, with maybe 150 stones or so, if that. I parked aside the road the best I could.

There was indeed a Spaulding family plot just to the left-hand corner. There we found a series of crumbling stones under a big oak tree being eaten away by lichen and moss. Some had fallen over, some were possibly sunken into holes in the ground. Several were in pieces and legibility varied greatly. We’d been warned they were in poor condition so I didn’t know what to expect. After surveying what we could find we started to piece together an interesting story.

We learned that Samuel Spaulding was the son of Christopher Columbus Spaulding and Lydia A Mapes Spaulding. He was one of four brothers, served in the Civil War, and probably lost all three of his brothers to the same war. William T Spaulding was the first to go in 1862 at the tender age of 13 (yes, children served – usually as drummers, fife players, and gophers) followed by John W and Liberty B. John W’s age was lost but Liberty B was 20. None of them appeared to be married and the stones all matched implying they’d been bought at the same time. In the Civil War era this frequently means there was either no bodies under them or possibly the wrong bodies who’d been shipped back. Samuel outlived the war and went on to have a family which would move out of Maine. I was struck by the loss. I’m more into Revolutionary War era stones so it was easy for me to bypass the devastation of the Civil War, even this far North.

We took some time to absorb this new information and take a rubbing of Samuel’s stone which was by far in the best condition. I took a few photos and took note of all the Spencers and Websters out here – two more family names I am supposed to be related to somehow. I wondered if this meant that five generations back our two families could have been related somehow. This whole excursion had been as enlightening as it was curious.

On the way home I got the additional adventure of having one of my tires melt off the Prius and explode as we were going down the highway. Luckily I noticed something was off and was already slowing down and turning into the break down lane when we heard a loud pop followed by a lot of wobbling. Trying to tell AAA where we were was a challenge and took at least 20 minutes as we had no idea and the GPS coordinates my phone gave me didn’t come up the same on the phone operator’s side. Another hour of waiting for a driver – the fear of not being able to be let in the cab due to covid – and finally being dropped off at Lincoln’s only tire store which did not carry appropriately sized tires – and we were starting to get punchy. We left with a tire that was too wide but still worked. The next day we’d tour three more tire stores before finding anything that could work for us. This ate up a great deal of time and tried everyone’s patience. Still, it was better than having more exploding tires!

And so ended this adventure. For now.

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