Prairie Guest House, Fishers Indiana

On a recent media trip in Indianapolis, I spent a little time in Hamilton County, staying at the Prairie Guest House Bed & Breakfast in Fishers. It was a charming spot with an interesting history located directly across from Conner Prairie. My husband, Paul, traveled with me and while I went to some of the media events, he stayed behind for a few hours on his own. 

He shared a little about his experience in the guest blog post below:

It was mid March so the weather was on the cold side with some snow flurries. I enjoy the outdoors and especially the change of seasons. The weather offers unique opportunities which I’ve learned to capitalize on. The birds were busy and chirping in spite of the cold and wind. 

After breakfast I planned to prepare my camera with tripod and flash. Upon arrival the evening before I noticed some good photo ops. 

Of course I needed coffee to get me started. Strawberry and pineapple gave me the right amount of sweetness. The bacon and potatoes added calories which I would burn to stay warm while outdoors taking pictures and enjoying nature. 

The B&B covers 2 acres, which allows for quite a variety of wildlife. There was plenty of room for me to roam with my camera. One of the things I was determined to photograph was a small statue which sat in the grass between the Guest House and the 1900's cottage. 

I wandered a little further and ran into what seemed to be a quite healthy and happy squirrel. He sat high in the tree and obviously felt safe from my intrusion into his peaceful world of eating nuts. The frozen grass crunched with each of my footsteps so I felt confident that the hungry squirrel was aware of my presence. But that did not deter the critter's appetite. 

After spending nearly two hours taking photos, I was cold and ready for another cup of coffee. There is a Kuerig in the foyer with a variety of coffee and tea to choose from. 

We spent two nights in the Hamilton suite. It was located on the second floor which included a seating area across from a window. I spent some time reading my book by the natural light, something which I find almost as relaxing as photography. 

The Prairie Guest House https://www.prairieguesthouse.com/ is located in Fishers Indiana. 

A Cherished Trip Anchored on Genealogy (Part 5)

When I left off last I was in a hotel in Frankfort, Kentucky with my Aunt Marilyn on day 7 of a 10-day trip through four states. Aunt Marilyn is 89 and wanting to make sure that some of the family history is passed on for future generations. I've been pegged as the mot interested in genealogy and so she wanted to share this information with me and take me on a trip to learn more.

We visited with five second and third cousins on the trip who I had never met and I had the opportunity to visit the farm where my grandfather was born and where generations before him farmed as far back as the 1830s.

It was quite an enlightening trip. In the hotel room that night, Aunt Marilyn pulled out a tattered and yellowed rolled paper. It turned out to be a hand-written family tree she had compiled that stretched back to the 1700s. We looked at it together and then Aunt Marilyn turned in for the evening. I was too excited to sleep. I dimmed the desk light and sat there examining every bit of that family tree. It dawned on me that in not one, but two of the three cemeteries we had been to, I was related in some way to every person buried there. I was figuring out all the connections - who married who and where different surnames came in. I was completely fascinated. I was just scratching the surface and didn’t know that the best part was yet to come. 

Also with Aunt Marilyn’s papers was a booklet printed in the 1950s that was a lengthy account of that branch of the family history. The author wrote an introduction stating that the purpose of the book was so that the family history was passed down to future generations and not forgotten. I found Martha Murphy (my great-great-grandmother whose grave I had seen at the small cemetery on the family farm) and traced back from there to learn that her grandfather had been born in Dublin, Ireland and came to the United States in the 1780s as a stowaway on a ship when he was a teenager, landing in Virginia. I felt like I’d struck gold. I’d always been told that we had Irish roots and finally I had it in ink in front of me. I traced my family back six generations and learned where this great, great, great, great grandfather of mine had come from. I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning studying this family tree and imagining what it might have been like to leave your family and home behind as a teenager with no plan in store and no security of knowing where you’d go when you got there.

On our last couple days of the trip we made our way into Illinois to the central Illinois area where Marilyn and my dad grew up with their two siblings and parents. I met another of Marilyn’s cousins (this time on her maternal side) in Charleston, who was so spry and peppy at the age of 90 and lived directly across the street from Eastern Illinois University where my dad and his siblings attended first through twelfth grade at the lab school where student teachers were trained. My dad also went to college there, graduating in 1958 with a degree in accounting. In our conversations about the cost of college, he’s told me that he lived at home and avoided the room & board charge, but that tuition was only $105 a year and that included summer classes. Can you even imagine that cost? His total college education was about $420!!!!!!!

We stayed at a hotel in Arcola and visited one of the local Amish restaurants for a feast of fried chicken and all the trimmings. We also visited two local cemeteries where Marilyn’s parents and several other family members were buried.

Our final stop was to visit another of Marilyn’s maternal cousins in Zion, Illinois where we had lunch with her and her husband and learned about their family, including their son who was a state police officer killed in the line of duty.

We returned after 10 days and it was an experience I’m so glad that I had. It was hard leaving my husband and kids for that long. I’d never been away from them for that many days and it had really been well over a decade since I’d taken any trip that long. But, it was precious time with my aunt, who lives in Minnesota and who I rarely get to see. And it was an opportunity to learn so much about the past and about our family history. I’ve since done some research online to see what more I can learn. My handwritten family tree from my Aunt goes back as far as the mid-1700s, so beyond that nothing is certain but hints that have shown up online lead back to lords and ladies and countesses and knights and earls in Scotland and England and it's fun to see where our family line potentially goes back further.

I’ve also kept in touch with Grant, who has sent me more bits of info from other relatives in his area. One piece he sent me was a story of a great-great-great-great-grandfather who married a Native American named Moonglow. She had helped him escape from some of the American Indians who were planning to kill him. Every once in a while I get a message from him with a little more info he has gotten from another relative. It's fascinating to get bits of info of an entire branch of my family I never knew existed a year ago.

I’ve tried over the years to jot down stories I’ve heard from my parents and aunts, but will definitely make a better effort now to record those memories and keep them accessible. If I don’t record it and share it and pass it down, then this is where it stops.

A Cherished Trip Anchored on Genealogy (Part 4)

I left off in the last entry toward the end of a 10-day trip with my Aunt Marilyn Sanchez, my father’s older sister. With her I set off on a four-state trip last fall where she’d introduce me to five second and third cousins I’d never met and their families. It was a fascinating trip that I really enjoyed.

We’d been to Dayton, Ohio where I met my Marilyn’s first cousin, Carole, and her family. I met Karen in Ashland, Kentucky. Her dad and Marilyn’s dad (my grandfather) were cousins. Then it was on to Frenchburg, Kentucky to meet Grant, whose paternal grandmother was a cousin of my paternal grandfather. 

Grant also took us to three different cemeteries where family members were buried. Grant and Marilyn pointed out a few headstones and explained who they were. I saw a lot of the same names over and over. One was Oldfield. 

I knew that Grant’s grandmother was an Oldfield and I knew that somewhere on my grandfather’s side there were Oldfields. My grandfather was born and raised on the Oldfield farm in Maytown, Kentucky, just outside Frenchburg. We visited the farm and made out names of a couple headstones (Dennie Oldfield and Martha Oldfield) on a little cemetery high a on hill on the farm, which is still in Grant’s family.

After we’d left Frenchburg and were settled in at our hotel for the night in Frankfort, Kentucky, Aunt Marilyn opened a bag she had in her trunk of more old photos and papers. She pulled out one rolled up piece of paper and said “You may want to look at this.” I was stunned. It was a handwritten family tree going back six generations to the 1700s. 

I couldn’t believe the treasure I had in front of me. Answers to so many questions I had were scrawled out on this long piece of paper. Aunt Marilyn and her late husband, John Sanchez, were very interested in genealogy. They’d traced back very far into the family. They’d visited England and seen the village where her mother’s family originated from before immigrating to the United States. She’d been to cemeteries in Virginia where some of our family’s early immigrants settled. This was all information jotted down from her first-hand knowledge and from what she was told to her by her relatives who had been born in the 19th century. This was the real deal - not something that was located online that may or may not be accurate. I was in awe.

I examined the family tree carefully trying to follow the lines and decipher the cursive writing going in several different directions. She had done it so long ago that it seemed to drop off around the 1970s. My name wasn't even included on it.

There was one relative who had 18 children. As I read on, I found where the Oldfield name came in. Rittie Oldfield, who was one of twelve children married Charles William Clark, was my great-grandmother. They were the parents of my paternal grandfather. It was in going back to Rittie’s parents, though, that led to my most exciting discovery. Read the conclusion of my trip in my next post.

A Cherished Trip Anchored on Genealogy (Part 3)

I left off last time mentioning that I was visiting Frenchburg, Kentucky, near where my grandfather was born on a trip with my 89-year-old aunt through four states to meet five new relatives I never knew existed. I should insert that I never met my grandfather. He died in the mid-1960s of a heart attack. He was in his late 60s. I wasn’t born until 1972. So, beyond my father and his siblings, I didn’t have much of a connection to that side of the family or know much about them.

We were visiting a cousin named Grant. His paternal grandmother and my paternal grandfather were cousins. My grandfather was also born and raised on the Oldfield family farm just outside Frenchburg in a tiny community called Maytown that Grant’s family still owns. On day two of our visit, Grant took us to three cemeteries. One was a modern one with many current gravestones, including that of his father, who has just passed away three months earlier. Another cemetery was mid-sized and it looked like it had been decades since anyone was buried there. Grant pointed out some land in the distance and I think he said a relative resided near there took care of the grounds.

The third cemetery was utterly fascinating. It was on the Oldfield family farm. It sat high on a hill far from the house and barns. We couldn’t even make it up there in our car. We had to jump into Grant’s 4-wheel drive truck to get up there. No one was living on the farm at the time and the cemetery had gotten a bit overgrown with foilage. It was surrounded by barbed wire fencing. From the outside I could only make out the last name of Oldfield on two headstones. Grant squeezed through some fencing to take a photo, scraping up his leg in the process. The photo showed that one was Dennie Oldfield (1886-1915) and the other was Martha Oldfield (1830-1913).

While Grant’s family headed out to a football game for their son, Jaxson, Marilyn and I had lunch on our own at a cute spot called the Cornbread Cafe not far from there house where I had one of my favorite southern meals, country fried streak with gravy and mashed potatoes. And I couldn’t go to a place called Cornbread Cafe and not have some cornbread. Everything was delicious.

Later that day, Grant shared a little bit of his family history and pulled out some family photos that we watched while cuddled on the sofa with their dog, Duke. His wife, Ashley, prepared a nice meal of spaghetti and salad and sweet tea for us that evening. 

The next day before heading out of town we joined them for a service at the Means Miracle Church, where I also met a local World War II veteran. It had rained heavily overnight and many spots in the hilly area had flooded. The Cornbread Cafe where we’d eaten the day before was under water. In fact, we weren’t quite sure we’d be able to make it out of the valley and back to the interstate because a lot of roadways were washed over. But we did make it out of town that morning and it was on to the state capitol of Frankfort to spend a night there before the next leg of the trip.

The original plan was to drive straight from Frenchburg to Vincennes, Indiana. I suggested we break it up and spend a night in Frankfort and Aunt Marilyn was sweet and flexible. It cut that day’s driving down from 6 hours to 2. We stopped for some pictures at the Kentucky State Capitol and relaxed a bit before heading out the next day for Vincennes, Indiana. 

We weren’t meeting any relatives in Vincennes - none that were living anyway. I did, however, get to learn a lot about someone who I’ve been told is one of my ancestors, George Rogers Clark, at the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park, which is part of the National Parks Service. My maiden name is Clark and I always loved hearing stories from my aunts and my dad about the family tie. Somewhere along the way I seem to remember hearing that we were 28th cousins to him, but I don’t even know how to go about tracking that to verify it. It was always a fun story to hear, though. The memorial is beautiful and we watched a short movie about Clark, an American Colonel during the Revolutionary War. His younger brother, William Clark, was half of the explorer duo of Lewis & Clark who set out on a two-year expedition west of the Mississippi River in 1804.

FRIENDS: The Experience Opens This Week in Chicago

Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the debut of what would become an iconic comedy series about six friends living in New York. Each week we'd get to know them a little better - Joey, the flirty soap opera actor; Chandler, the high-strung, sarcastic jokester with an unfulfilling desk job; Monica, the responsible, competitive and ultra neat chef; Rachel, Monica's best friend and roommate - a spoiled, but sweet rich girl who has no experience in adulting; Ross, Monica's big brother, the lovable and brainy, but boring paleontologist; and Phoebe, the eccentric masseuse/songstress who performs such compelling tunes as "Smelly Cat" in a coffee shop.

There were so many laughs, adventures, twists and turns that the NBC sitcom took over the ten seasons on air and you can step back into that era during this pop-up exhibit opening October 1 and running through January 3 at The Shops at North Bridge, 540 N. Michigan. Entry begins on the lower level at the FRIENDS The Experience Store, where you can snag fun stuff like pins, t-shirts and Funko Pop! figures. COVID-19 precautions are in place that include having all merchandise behind glass so it is only handled by staff. The gift shop is open to the public without an admission needed, so even if you can't make it to the see the exhibit, you can stop by for some FRIENDS merchandise souvenirs.

Also on the first floor is an amazing recreation of Central Perk constructed entirely of plastic play blocks. You can even sit on the sofa for photos. Up on the second floor you begin in your first of 12 rooms where you can again, have a seat on an orange sofa in front of the fountain in a mock-up set of the show's opener. Throughout the exhibit is a steady stream of interactive fun that includes the purple door, the hallway, interiors of Joey and Chandler's apartment and Rachel and Monica's. You can view original costumes, scripts and get a chronological look at Rachel's do's. There are spaces dedicated to each of the characters and a recreation of a spot that is central to most of the episodes, Central Perk. Also, be sure to binge and brush up your FRIENDS knowledge so you can crush the touches trivia game with a screen that you control with foot pedals.

Friends The Experience has already made its way to New York and Boston and Chitown is its third stop. Created by Superfly X, Warner Bros. Consumer Products and Warner Bros. Television Group, "The One in Chicago" will be open daily with online ticketing available for timed entry for $35 per guest. Private access reservations can also be made for groups of 6 or 10 for an additional charge. Health and safety precautions include social distancing and limited capacity, temperature checks, UV sterilization, hand sanitizing stations and ongoing cleaning of high-touch surfaces. Masks are required for entry.

For ticket information, hours and more, visit friendstheexperience.com/chicago.

 A Cherished Trip Anchored on Genealogy (Part 2)

I left off in my last blog entry after visiting Dayton, Ohio to meet a second cousin on a trip planned by my 89-year-old Aunt Marilyn. The trip would include four states and meeting five relatives I had never met before.

After leaving Ohio, we set out for Ashville, Kentucky where we’d meet a distant cousin for dinner. Karen’s father and my grandfather were cousins, I learned, and then Karen and Aunt Marilyn pulled out old photos and talked about relatives I’d never heard of. She was delightful and sweet and I was so glad to meet her. 

The next day was wide open as Marilyn liked to always spend two nights in one place so there was a full day in between places and a hotel room waiting for an afternoon rest. The area seemed to be heavy in the coal industry with not a lot in the way of tourism, but we headed to the nearby Ashland/Boyd County Convention & Visitors Bureau to see what we could do that day. We learned that Billy Ray Cyrus was from that town and filmed his “Achy Break Heart” video at the nearby Paramount Arts Center. 

A mural in downtown Nashville, Kentucky.

We gathered brochures on the area and one was a self-guided tour of Ashland with a very detailed map to help get you from one stop to another. Marilyn suggested we do the tour. Much of it could be seen from the car and it wouldn’t require a lot of walking, but would help us learn some of the local history. It turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the trip. If traveling with my family, my kids never would have had the patience to complete the route, which included roughly two-dozen stops. So, off we went. I was behind the wheel. Marilyn was the co-pilot. At each stop she read aloud the paragraphs from the brochure with background on each location. Several spots were historic mansions, some were businesses, one was a park with Indian mounds. It was a lovely way to spend a couple of hours and so nice to take it all in without feeling rushed.

We viewed a number of mansions on our self-guided tour of downtown Ashville, Kentucky

We learned that Billy Ray Cyrus was from Ashville and filmed his Achy Breaky Heart video at the downtown Paramount Theatre.

When we left Ashland, we headed for Frenchburg, Kentucky. This was a part of the trip I was really looking forward to. We would meet Grant, whose grandmother was a cousin of my grandfather. Grant was also close to my age with kids close in age to mine, whereas the other cousins I was meeting were a bit older. Instead of staying at a hotel, we’d be staying at his home and meeting his wife and one of his two sons. 

Grant’s father, who had passed away a couple months earlier, had lived on the Oldfield Family Farm. The farm dates back to around 1830  - where my great, great, great grandfather and his siblings farmed. It was amazing to learn that it is still in the family. This is what Marilyn most wanted me to see - the farm where my grandfather (her father) was born and raised and lived before coming to Illinois and settling in central Illinois in the mid 1910s in Charleston where farming conditions would be better.

After leaving Ashville, we headed to Frenchburg to meet a cousin named Grant for lunch at a Cracker Barrell. He knew I was a food blogger and was so hospitable, making sure I got to try some good food during out stay at his home. He introduced me to Ale-8 soda at lunch that day.

We first met up with Grant for lunch at a Cracker Barrell just off the expressway and then followed him back to his place. He knew I was a food blogger and thought long and hard about where to go for dinner that evening. We ended up quite off the beaten path and drove into the Red River Gorge to eat at the Red River Rockhouse, an eclectic cafe that focuses on using ingredients from local farmers and artisans. The drive there was beautiful and the grass-fed beef burger I had was delicious. That was also the day I was introduced to Ale-8-One soda, one of Grant’s favorite beverages. It’s a regional favorite and kind of ginger-ale/lemon-lime hybrid that is tasty and refreshing. We also drove through a cool one-lane natural tunnel to get to the restaurant and also took a little side trip to a scenic area nearby, Broke Leg Falls.

The natural tunnel we traveled through on our way to dinner in the Red River Gorge.

Fog rises as we drive through the Red River Gorge at dusk.

The thing Aunt Marilyn most wanted me to see on our trip was a farm in the community of Maytown, Kentucky where her father was born and raised.

The next day Grant took us on a tour of three cemeteries. In each, I recognized some names from conversation and others I had never heard before, but I was fascinated by scanning gravesites and seeing clusters of headstones with graves of several family members situated together. When we travel, I do find it very interesting to visit cemeteries. I marvel at how short lives were when you go back a couple centuries and I feel a sense of gratitude and grief at viewing stones of veterans or those who never returned home when called to serve.

In a small family cemetery that sat up on a hill on the Oldfield Farm were headstones marking the graves of relatives going back five generations.

Grant also took us to visit a scenic area called Broke Leg Falls in Eastern Kentucky.

Aunt Marilyn and I at Broke Leg Falls where trees were toppled in a tornado that had ripped through the area.

A Cherished Trip Anchored on Genealogy (Part 1)

I wrote a travel column recently that mentioned my Aunt Marilyn and a trip we took together in September 2018. When I posted it on my Facebook page, someone commented that they couldn't wait to read more about Aunt Marilyn and our travels. 

I remembered that I had written a series of columns last year about the trip that for some reason never ran - probably because they were so long. Anyway, I figured they should be shared somewhere, so here's part 1 of our trip together with more to follow.

 

A Cherished Trip Anchored on Genealogy (Part 1)

Around this time last year I got a letter from my dear aunt, Marilyn Sanchez, who lives near the Twin Cities in Minnesota. She doesn’t do email. She doesn’t even own a computer. And well, it just seems hard to time it right for phone calls, so we correspond the old-fashioned way - with notecards and stationery and stamps from the U.S. Postal Service.

Aunt Marilyn is 88 - she’ll be turning 89 this spring. In her letter, she asked if I might be interested in taking a trip with her to meet some relatives I have never met before - cousins and second and third cousins. She wanted me to see the small town in Eastern Kentucky where my her father was born. I loved the idea. 

When I was growing up, our family wasn’t one that took vacations in station wagons across the country. The trips we took were pretty limited - we’d make a 3-hour trip to central Illinois for a family reunion. Or from the Chicago suburbs to Northwest Indiana to a bed and breakfast my mom loved. Or to a lakeside rental cabin on Cedar Lake. Besides those brief trips close to home, I didn’t leave the state until the summer I was 12-going-on-13. My older sister’s wedding was in July of 1985 and my Aunt Marilyn and Uncle John attended the wedding and suggested taking me and my twin sisters back with them on a trip. That would be our first taste of travel - and I credit them with passing on the travel bug that led me in that wanderlust direction and resulted in me becoming a travel writer.

Aunt Marilyn is my dad’s older sister. He’s the youngest of four. His oldest sister, Ramona, also offered to bring us to their Missouri farm for part of the trip. So, we spent two weeks with my Aunt Ramona and Uncle Roland on their farm not far from St. Louis. From there, Uncle John picked us up, drove us through Iowa and back to his home in Minneapolis where we spent a week. 

We had a blast. We spent time in their community, went to the ValleyFair amusement park (where we thought Aunt Marilyn was the coolest aunt ever for riding roller coasters with us) and then they took us up to Canada. It was back in the days when you didn’t need a passport to cross the border and they took us into Thunder Bay where we saw Lake Superior and spent the night. Both Marilyn and John were educators and they knew the value of travel and exposing children to new surroundings and I’m so thankful for them and that trip through three new states and a new country.

That was the last time I had traveled with Aunt Marilyn. She and Uncle John have traveled all over the world and my other sisters have taken trips with her — including one through Europe. I was very excited to be planning this trip and to travel with her and to be introduced to family members. I’ve always been interested in family history and she knows that. I wrote her back and told her I’d love to do a trip with her.

Later I got a reply from her with a little more info on where we were going and who I’d be meeting. The trip would take us through four states and I’d be meeting five cousins I had never heard of. It was scheduled for early September. I was a little nervous about it. It would be the start of the school year and cross country season I wasn’t sure what I’d be missing with the kids. It would mean hubby would have to pick up the slack ofeeding everyone and chauffeuring everyone around. 

Other than a handful of overnighters, I’d never really traveled without the kids. Our trip would end up being 10 days. It was the longest I’d ever been away from my husband and kids. And really there have only been two trips I’ve ever taken that have been that have been more than a week - one across the state of Tennessee from Memphis to the Smoky Mountains in 1997 and one in 2006 to South Carolina and Tennessee. This would definitely be new, but I was really excited about this adventure.

We set off on Labor Day weekend. Our destination was Dayton, Ohio where we’d join a Labor Day barbecue with Marilyn’s cousin, Carol, and her family. Marilyn arrived at my house the day before our departure for Ohio and showed us old family photos and refreshed my memory on the relatives I had met and heard about who was pictured. I learned that Marilyn’s father and Carol’s mother were siblings.

My Aunt Marilyn (right) and her cousin, Carol, (left). She was the first cousin we visited for a Labor Day cook-out with her family at her home in Dayton, Ohio.

We arrived right on time to Carol’s for a 2 p.m. barbecue. There we met her daughter and two sons and a niece and nephew. After a little visiting and some dinner, we set off for our hotel with plans to meet for dinner the next day. 

Since our day was open until the evening, Marilyn suggested we find some local sites to check out. We first went to the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center. I really didn’t know anything about Dayton before our visit and was surprised at the amount of aviation history and attractions that exist there. We visited the Wright Cycle Company which was run by brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright in this original building that is a designated National Historic Landmark. We then toured the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center, which is part of the National Parks Service. We watched an interesting movie about the brothers and walked through the exhibits.

I enjoyed visiting the National Museum of the USAF.

I had the chance to board some presidential planes during our stop at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

When I noticed that the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force was there, I asked Marilyn if we could stop there as well. I had no idea how massive the museum would be. It is the world’s largest and oldest military aviation museum and Ohio’s most visited free attraction. We only had a short window to visit, so we picked out a couple things we wanted to see and tried to move through quickly, but you could easily spend a full afternoon there. My favorite part was the exhibit of presidential planes. I even walked through JFK’s presidential plane and there were others that could also be boarded. It was very impressive and a spot I’d definitely recommend if you are visiting southeast Ohio.

That evening we had dinner with Carol and her kids to celebrate her 84th birthday. We drove a bit to Centerville to a restaurant called Sweeney’s. She requested seafood and according to her son’s, Sweeney’s was the place to go. We enjoyed a good meal and then returned to our hotel for a night of rest before an early morning departure for Kentucky.