Bethlehem Cemetery

My great grandparents, John Adam and Elizabeth Zaun, came to America from Germany in 1867.  I had heard of them, but knew nothing at all about them.  Last fall, I discovered online that they were buried in Bethlehem Cemetery in Richmond.  This was a surprise -  I  previously had no idea where they had lived or died.  Furthermore, it said the cemetery was on Penick Road.  That road was very familiar to me, as it was the street address of my great grandparents.  When I was growing up, my family made the pilgrimage to the little house on Penick Road to see "Nannie and Poppoo" about twice a year.  I wrote them letters regularly as a child, so the address was permanently forged in my memory.

In November 2013, my sister and her husband and I were on our way to a relative's birthday party in the Richmond area, so we decided to stop at the cemetery to see if we could find the graves.  It was a tiny cemetery and many of the stones were very old and illegible.  But as we searched, we found other ancestors' graves.  Everywhere we turned, it seemed, we saw another family name!  Powell, Abbott, Lukhard, Bryant, Zaun, Wright... we even found the graves of infants that we never knew existed.  I took pictures of all of their tombstones.

When I got home and uploaded the photos, I noticed an astonishing coincidence.  My photo of my great grandmother's grave, Ida Rene Abbott, was taken from the same angle as a photo taken in 1933, the day she was buried.  The same shot, 80 years apart! The church in the background looked the same.

In another old photo in my collection, my great great grandfather Jefferson Monroe Powell is standing next to a plaque honoring my great great grandmother Powell - I realized that this picture was taken at the same church.