Old Basil Cemetery, Baltimore, Ohio

Old Basil Cemetery is located on Market street in  Baltimore, Fairfield County, Ohio.

Why, you may ask, is it old?  Well, there's a new Basil cemetery too (I think it's official name may be Memorial).

Why, you ask next, is it called Basil when it's clearly in Baltimore?  I was told that Basil and Baltimore were separate towns that grew into each other.  When they decided to merge, after playing a bit with names like Basilmore, the merged town took the name Baltimore.

If you are quite finished...

This is a lovely little old cemetery.  It's very easy to find, but hard to park -- I didn't find any on-street parking, and the only driveway technically belongs to a mechanic's business tucked away behind the cemetery, but no one seemed to mind when I parked beside one of their buildings.

I do wish Fairfield county genealogists would get as organized about on-site directories as those in the Nebraska counties I visited last year; I got spoiled!  Fortunately, it's not that big and I did have a list of people to look for from my visit to to the genealogy society.

I found lots of Langels and related folks, mostly from the line of Daniel and Susannah Langel.  You can see my finds here.  Find A Grave appears to have good coverage -- see their page here.

Mt. Carmel Cemetery, Fairfield County, Ohio

Tuesday after NGS2012, I started a grand tour of cemeteries used by my Langel folks up in the Columbus area.  First up on the tour: Mt. Carmel Cemetery, on Basil-Western Road about a quarter mile west of Eversole.  It's pretty well hidden by trees if you're travelling west, so I didn't find it until I turned around and headed back east.  I didn't see a driveway or parking area, so I just pulled off the side of the road, ran over to the cemetery, and snapped a few quick pictures.

The two markers I was hunting here were the ones for David and Eliza (Behney) Langel, my GGG-grandparents, and Eliza and Elnora Langel, two of their daughters.  The stone for Eliza and Elnora presented a new mystery:

The death date for Eliza hasn't been finished!  My best guess is that Eliza was still alive when Elnora died in 1914; Eliza bought one stone for both of them and had this carving done.  The question is why the date wasn't updated when Eliza died.  Did the family (and mortuary) forget?  Seems unlikely.  Was there not enough money?  Perhaps she's not even buried there.  Perhaps she moved far enough away that her new neighbors or family didn't know about the old stone.  Or maybe she got married and is buried with her husband, under her married name?  As usual, one new piece of information creates as many questions as it answers...

Charles Langel, 6th Ohio Volunteer Infantry

It seems fitting that I'm spending Memorial Day looking into the military service of Charles Langel, my great-grandfather.  I found his cemetery marker during my trip to Ohio:

and look at that little marker stuck in the ground.  Here...let me get you a closer look:

Apparently, he served in the military.  I didn't know!

Ancestry.com has some more information.  He served in the Ohio National Guard for several years, and then joined the 6th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in 1898.  He was the captain of Company E during their stays in Tennessee and Georgia, and when they were to sent to Cuba for about 4 months.  Ancestry has a scanned "war album" of this year of active duty, which has lots of lovely information, but it is incredibly frustrating -- it's a picture book, but the scans of the pictures are all high contrast and, therefore, useless. I wish they would rescan in grayscale so we can see those pictures of camp kitchens and Thanksgiving dinner and the company prank!

Well, I'm off to order a pension file.  I also need to find out why we were sending soldiers to Cuba in 1898...

Advent Calendar -- Holiday Foods

My grandfather was an owner of the Jo-Mar Dairy in Salina, KS, and one of our family's Christmas food traditions stems from that...sort of.  The dairy used pewter ice cream molds to make colorful holiday treats; vanilla ice cream was molded into holiday shapes and then painted with food coloring. I'm told that they were beautiful, but very labor intensive.  By the time I came along, the dairy no longer sold molded ice cream for the holidays, and my grandfather had brought some of the molds home.

For many years, we tried, and mostly failed, to make molded ice cream at home.  The molds were individual serving sized, so there wasn't a lot of mass to the ice cream, and the difference between too cold to pop out of the mold and to warm to hold the detail was a pretty small temperature band that's hard to find in a kitchen already warm from cooking a holiday dinner.  I'm sure that having small "helpers" added to the challenge, as well!  Still, it felt special to have them, even if they didn't stand up properly or have totally crisp details.

In 2003, we tried again.  Success!

Of course, nowadays, those molds are collectibles and people are warned not to use them for food because of lead concerns.  Pity.