With her grandmother

In genealogical research, as in life, we expect things to happen in a certain order: people are born, get married, have children, and die and are laid to rest. Their children survive them, and follow the same pattern. Perhaps because this is our expectation, the exceptions seem stark reminders that nothing in life is a given. 

When our daughter was stillborn, our world fell apart; nothing seemed to make sense. I realize now how incredibly difficult it must have been for our parents, who were not expecting to outlive their grandchild, having to deal with being unable to spare their own adult children the pain of losing their child. 

Several months after her death, I had a dream, where a colleague who had recently passed away came to me at a disjointed cocktail party, and told me that he wanted me to know that our daughter was with my grandmother. I woke in tears, partly because of the rawness of the loss (which remains), and partly because I knew exactly how loving my Grammie would be to her. 

Child and infant loss is unfortunately common in every family tree, but it is rare to find anything more than a record of a birth and then a loss. Every now and then, they appear in a census record, but more often the child has no name, and no record even exists. So imagine my mitigated joy in seeing how a father recounts his daughter's brief existence in his family notes in the back of the his journal:

"Caroline Lucretia - my first daughter died at Hastings Minnesota September 3d 1856 - about 11:00 o'clock at night. She was buried in the Hastings cemetery, but was removed and buried in County Line cemetery [...] My mother and daughter rest in the same grave—marked by a small granite headstone."

A daughter lies with her grandmother