2018 Summer Road Trip: Day 5

Sometime in the middle of the night of camping, my poor husband came down with a nasty bug. He had incredible aches and fevers, and he slept terribly or not much at all. Nevertheless, he pushed on, heavily medicated.

We saw some racoons at our campsite in the morning. Nobody got eaten or bitten, so that was a win.

We did some "hiking" in Starved Rock State Park. I say "hiking," but the trails were almost all entirely built up with wooden planks. There was virtually no walking on the original ground.

It was a pretty cool state park. Some other hikers informed me that it is the go-to place for a lot of Chicagoans who want to get away from city life.

After that, we headed to Chicago.

Now, for some back story. I started doing genealogy in 2005, just a few months after Eric and I were married. As one of my assignments, I picked my Sexton family and started working on learning more about them. They are on my dad's side of the family, and my mom mentioned his grandmother saying that her parents were first cousins. I looked at the tree our family already had and figured out right away that Mary Ann Sexton and Sarah Sexton must have been sisters. But who were their parents? Our details about both were pretty sparse, but we had a bit more information about Mary Ann. Researching this family and tracing them in original historic records was my first real foray into genealogy. I think the fact that they were my first family to really trace on my own and learn about on my own, contributes to them being some of my favorite ancestors.

The stories behind these sisters, their parents, and their husbands unfolded to me over the course of my studies. I have continued researching them in the last thirteen years. I had wanted to go to Chicago before knowing I had ancestors who had settled the city (Mary Ann and Sarah's father was a master carpenter who arrived in the city at least by 1836, a year before the the town of Chicago became the city of Chicago). Visiting Chicago was a long-awaited-for wish finally made into reality.

I could easily go back there and spend another 2-3 weeks wandering around, doing various family history things, and various touristy things, but we only had about 2.5 days there.

The first thing we did when we arrived in the city was go to one of the oldest cemeteries in the city (now technically in Evanston), Calvary Cemetery. My Sexton ancestors are buried there, and although their tombstones seem to have gone the way of the world (or possibly never existed, but I consider that doubtful since they were rather a wealthy family), it was still exciting for me to finally be where they are buried. We found the Ennis tombstones, which included Mary Ann, her husband, and three of their children, in addition to one daughter-in-law. The large monument is for the couple's oldest son; at age 21, he took over his father's law practice and became the guardians to several younger siblings when his father died suddenly in 1880. I have read so much about this man, particularly his fierce protection of his younger siblings in the public schools, where they were persecuted for being Catholic in a highly Protestant area, and I just have so much respect for him. And, despite everything I knew about this family, I did not know that Lawrence was a veteran of the Spanish American war. How did I miss that?

I loved teaching my children about their ancestors. It was so meaningful to me.

After finding the Ennis tombstones, we found a shady spot and had lunch. I remember in my classes at BYU that some of my professors talked about taking their kids to cemeteries and plopping the kids down for lunch while my professors did their research. It was a little like that.

After bearing with me at the cemetery, we told the kids we could go to the beach. My phone told us where the closest beach was, I did the parallel parking, we changed clothes, and just as we got to the entrance we learned it was a beach that would cost us quite a bit of money to enter. As we hemmed and hawed about how much we really wanted to go to the beach, it started pouring down rain. Then the lightning started, the lifeguards got everyone out of the water. Decision made, we headed out to our home for the next couple of nights.

My Ennis ancestors lived on Goethe Street, so obviously I had to take a picture of the street sign when I saw it.