Phil Thornton, grandson of pioneer Lovewell historian Orel Poole, has supplied a wide panorama of photos for this site, from a spooky graveyard at Nelsonville, Ohio, to waves crashing on the beach at Manzanita, Oregon, and a forest fire in Wyoming, lying just about halfway in between the other two. This time Phil let his drone hover over White Rock Cemetery where evergreens shade the graves of Thomas and Orel Jane Lovewell and members of their family.
2025 has obviously seen an unusually well-watered spring in the vicinity of White Rock Cemetery. The picture above is a close-up view of the trees on the right-hand side of the small picture beneath it.
A heads-up from Phil for the impending arrival of his drone footage reached me around the same time I received word of the death of my cousin Nancy Higbee at a nursing home in Belleville.
The close proximity of these two events set me to thinking about the odd chain of coincidences that eventually led me to launch this website in the first place.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. You see, I had this dream. In the dream the sun had gone down about half an hour earlier and I was standing in a cemetery aiming the beam of my flashlight across a cluster of headstones, scrutinizing the inscriptions for clues. I felt certain that one of these contained the key to an important secret that would change everything I thought I knew.
One weekend, after that same dream had interrupted my sleep for several nights in a row, I suddenly announced a road-trip, climbed into my car and drove north a few hundred miles.
A quick first stop at White Rock Cemetery turned up nothing new, so I headed to the much more thoroughly populated Balch Cemetery northeast of Formoso, on a quest to locate the grave of my great-grandfather John Robinson, who I once believed had lived at Formoso. Instead of finding his headstone, I ran into Nancy.
Cousin Nancy was the only young lady I knew at all well before I turned six, since I was often left home alone during the day and would wander across the street to her parents’ house when I was bored or hungry. Thanks to Nancy I learned that girls were entirely different from boys, inasmuch as they shaved their legs and applied red polish to their fingernails.
While observing one of these grooming rituals I picked up her razor and managed to slice open the webbing between my thumb and index finger, leading to my lifelong aversion to red nail polish.
Oh, and of course I learned that girls are also more prone to stormy outbursts of emotion. She visited my mother in tears one day and had to be consoled after learning that her steady boyfriend might be deployed overseas. It all ended well. A few years later I would serve as ring-bearer at their wedding.
The day of my visit to Balch Cemetery Nancy happened to be there with her husband Jack, who turned out to be the caretaker, a post he held for 37 years. In the back seat of their car sat my aunt Vera, Nancy’s 92-year-old mother, who used to prepare me a breakfast treat of warm homemade bread drenched in cream and topped with a spoonful of sugar. It remains the most delicious thing I have ever been served. I leaned inside the car and gave Vera a hug.
Then Nancy informed me that I was on the trail of the wrong John Robinson. The man I should have been looking for was a John Robinson who had been murdered in Kansas City and was probably buried there. Immediately I hopped back into my car and started for home. I had what I had come looking for, an important secret that changed everything I thought I knew
I called Nancy a few nights later and we enjoyed a fine long chat filled with wild family stories, at least one of which I was eventually able to validate. I should have reminded Nancy that evening to write down absolutely everything she remembered hearing about our grandparents and great-grandparents.
Somebody's version of the truth is at least a good starting point.