Psychic Roots

On this Day of the Dead, I sent to the editor of the Rootsweb Newsletter the following:

I was very interested in the story in the last newsletter about the couple whose baby had lost a shoe at a cemetery, and when they went looking for the shoe, it was found on the grave they had been looking for and had passed by.

I had a similar experience a few years ago when my husband and I went went from our home in Washington State to meet his 94 year old aunt in El Paso TX. He had not seen this aunt or visited that town in 50 years, and was surprised that I had found her by calling all the people with her husband's name living in that town. I had hoped to find a son of hers with the same name. It turned out my husband's cousin had died years before, but his Aunt Lola was still alive (and still is at 97). We took her to the historic Concordia cemetery in El Paso TX where I knew my husband's grandfather Primitivo, Aunt Lola's brother-in-law, was buried. She knew that he had been buried in the same plot with his mother Marciana, my husband's great-grandmother and Lola's mother-in-law that she never knew since Lola had been only a small child when Marciana died.

We walked to a large old tree, where Aunt Lola remembered "Marcianita's" grave was, but she hadn't been there in years, and was having trouble finding it. It was difficult for her to walk around the gravelly, scrubby, sandy earth that most cemeteries in the Southwest have, and she was using a cane. Everyone with us had split up and were walking some distance from the tree, somewhat giving up on the notion we would find the grave, but Aunt Lola stood steadfast near the tree, saying "I know it is somewhere around here". When I turned to look at her, she was resting one elbow on the back of a tall headstone. As I approached her from the front of the headstone, my eyes were drawn to the name on a small plaque on the worn slab under that tall headstone: "Primitivo-----", and above his name, barely visible on the older slab due to the wear it had taken from sandstorms since 1912 was the name incised on the slab---- "Marciana----".

I felt chills, thinking, Marciana and her son had wanted to be found, and caused Aunt Lola to stop and rest her elbow on that stone so that we could find them.

Emilie Garcia
Port Orchard, WA ----