We're all gonna live

I do genealogical research all day, every day. I am all too aware that the people whose lives I get to know quite intimately are no longer with us. These people lived full lives. They worked, learned, sweated, cried, laughed, and loved just like we do now, but in the end we’re all gonna have the same fate. We are all going to make the transition from this world to the next. I won’t say the D word because Heavenly Father rules over the living. Our ancestors are living, just in another state right now. How do I know this? Besides my religious beliefs, I receive guidance in the course of research all the time. Genealogists of all religions talk about our ancestors letting us find them. Sometimes it seems like they don’t want to be found and then suddenly the floodgates will open.

This is the story of one family who made me work really hard to find them. One of my ancestors I was pursuing was my great-grandfather William George Vandersluys, whose daughter (my grandmother) was still living at the time. All the information she had given me over the years led nowhere. After five years of pursuing leads on William, I had nothing. The name Vandersluys is very rare in England, but I found a few pockets of the surname in Cornwall. I was determined to go to Cornwall and luckily two weeks before I did, I finally found record of William and his family in the 1871 British census, reported as living in the village of Perranzabuloe, County of Cornwall, England.

Off I went to England with this one little piece of information. My husband Jerry and I sat in our hotel room in Truro perusing a map when a name jumped out at me, St. Clement. I knew that the name sounded familiar and that some Vandersluys families had lived there. At the front desk, we were told that it was only two miles from the city center where we were staying. Ten minutes later we stepped out of a cab and back in time 200 years to a little village on the shores of a river surrounded by rolling hills. The ninth-century Norman church sat amongst thatch-roofed cottages with low doorways. The only touch of modernity in the village was the classic red British public telephone box. We walked down a slight hill covered with subtropical plants to a path alongside the river.
My husband and I walked back up the hill and passed through the lychgate of the parish church also called St. Clement. The lychgate is a small covered gate where mourners stand for a burial service if the weather is inclement. We scoured the tombstones for any sign of my ancestors’ names. The tall grass and muddy soil made walking difficult and we literally tripped over a few headstones, most worn bare by the weather. Jerry made a comment that summed up the situation, saying, “If anyone were ever going to reach up through the ground and grab your ankles, this would be the place.”

Only a few graves, directly behind the church, remained to be searched. As I walked along a path beside the church, I saw a headstone that marked the grave of a child aged two years and nine months, named William George Vandersluys. This child, my great-great-grandfather’s nephew, had the same name as my great-grandfather, who died 75 years later in Utah. I stumbled upon the only legible Vandersluys headstone in the county of Cornwall, I have discovered since. Was I led or just lucky?

The headstone reads:
Wherefore shall we make our mourn
Now the darling child is dead
God recalls his precious loan
He to Paradise is fled