Trudging through tombstones

The family name

My husband and I had a few days to ourselves a couple of weeks ago in Bear Lake.
The grandkids all had to be in school so after Labor Day it was just us so we decided to visit those local cemeteries that we always drive by and where we always say "We ought to stop there one day and look up the graves of..."
We started with the Bloomington cemetery where we knew there were Haddock kin.
Right away we found success as the Haddock ancestors are all in the same southwest corner.
We shot photographs and took down the pertinent details so we could fix errors we've found in New Family Search.
We then buzzed over to the Paris cemetery where we knew his mother's parents were buried. We each took half of the place and tromped through the thistle and pinecones trying to find Dunns.
No luck. We called Marc's brother Kerry who is the Bear Lake County Recorder and asked what he knew. He came up from his office in Paris and tried to help. He couldn't find anything either but he promised to use his connections and see if he could get a plot map (which he did and which we then used to find the pair of markers I had to have walked by at least three times).
We went on to Bennington and Georgetown, places Marc didn't realize had any of his ancestors until now.
We found his mother's mother's folks.
We found the name of one of her grandfathers on a plaque outside the DUP relic house. He'd been a prominent member of the community, a schoolteacher.

Who knew?

We looked around in Georgetown and found more names that matter to us.
We came back to Montpelier and found Marc's mom and dad's graves — from his dad's he can see over the third hole on the local golf course where he spent much of his leisure time.

The Dunn headstones we couldn't find

We stopped at the Oregon Trails Center and discovered the washtub and golf club "guitar" his dad used as a prop when he performed with the popular Lion's Club Trio.
We discovered a book about Max Haddock that detailed the trio's journey and told us things we never knew about this man. We unearthed a couple of CDs with their songs recorded on them.
All in all, it proved to be a most valuable few days.
We now have so much more to do and so much more pressure.
These people in the ground have become real to us and it's a lot harder to ignore them.