Some of my ancestors...

Maine is quite literally littered with graveyards. Every few miles you come along a new graveyard. The interesting thing is that many of these graveyard seem to be placed on hills. Maybe so they wouldn't take up usable farm land or something. We stopped at the East Bethel Cemetary to look at a few of my relatives gravestones.



Here is my Grandfather William Straw Hastings. Straw was not his given middle name. I will update the story of why he took the middle name Straw in my next post. He and a good friend of his drown in a boating accident when my dad was nine.



My Grandmother, Ruth Linnie Cole Hastings. Raised 3 children by herself by working as a teacher. Completed her college degree late in life. I remember very little about her except that she sewed us boys a ton of clothes, and when she died, we inherited her Ford Grenada.



My Great Grandfather, George Kimball Hastings. He committed suicide a few months after my Grandfather died. He was depressed about the death of his son, had some health problems, and a great hatred for hospitals due to his feelings that hospitals led to his wife's death. He was a big time hunter and worked with his uncle Gideon to trap capture wild animals. A deer George caught was sold to Central Park in 1890.



My Great Grandmother, May L Hastings. To put her two sons through college, May went into the egg producing business.



My Uncle...He was a Marine, and the quintessential outdoors guy. Worked in the woods of New Hampshire all of his life and specialized in underwater rescue / recovery.



And finally, my dad and step mom. It is a little weird to stand next to your father looking down on his grave stone. He made sure to tell us that he doesn't want to be buried there...he wants to be cremated and scattered over Montana. The stone is for letting people know that he exited.

My next post will be on the 3 Hastings houses in Bethel. One of them is a museum, one a private residence (but maintained as a museum)and the third is a bed and breakfast complete with an Italian restaurant and martini bar.