An Incredible Family Day in White Hall, Illinois.

Part 1. On Friday, Aug. 21, 2020, we left Chicago for a very special "Back to the Past" Experience in tiny White Hall, Illinois, where my grandparents lived & raised their family. With help from cousins, we were able to visit the homes & farms of our aunts & uncles, guided by a cousin who offered to "ease you way". She proved most valuable, as she seemed to know every single person who now occupied these farms & houses, & if she didn't, she knew how to introduce herself to them.
The highlight for that part of the "White Hall House Tour" was a visit to our grandparents' farm, where everything looked so small to our grown up (or "grown old") eyes. We have such fond memories of that warm & welcoming space. We actually found the "Lincoln Penny", just where it had always been, embedded in a concrete watering trough. We visited that penny every time we arrived on that property.

Part 2: The second segment was a last-minute add-on, & was most interesting, & for me, the end of a long journey to get INSIDE "the House That Jane Built", a farmhouse in the Federal style, built by our gr-gr-gr grandma Jane Moses Roodhouse to house her 9 children. She left Cawood, Yorkshire, England in June, 1830 with her husband Benjamin, 2 daughters, 4 sons, & another 6 month old son, journeying to central Illinois via the Atlantic Ocean, the Hudson River, the Erie Canal, a series of overland roads & maybe canals, & several rivers. Ben bought a farm with a log cabin on it, & died a year later of fever. She & her children survived & thrived on the Illinois prairie. They built this house with bricks kilned outside it, across the road from what became our grandfather's house/farm, but we'd never been INSIDE. It was "restored" or "renovated" by a cousin in 1976, & we'd seen a few pictures. He eventually sold the house, & another cousin of ours, after that sale, bought it. A letter sent to him seemed to work! He responded to me once by letter, then again by text, inviting us INSIDE for a tour. We couldn't wait.

We were there about 2 hours, first touring the house, & then chatting on our host's back deck overlooking the pond. We were all in masks, of course, but at the end, I asked him & his lovely daughter to take off their masks for a picture. And there he was, with his face so familiar. He definitely IS our cousin!

Part 3: To finish our tour, we all did the "Covid Tour" to White Hall Cemetery, home to the many family members we either knew or heard about while growing up. It's a lovely place, having been maintained for a very long time by a favorite great uncle of ours, whose home was on our tour, right next door to his father's house, our Great-Grandfather. It was a good way to wrap up our day, & to organize our mental family trees, as all the different actors seemed to be lined up in rows, ready to make their final bows.