On a side note, the spring and summer of 1873 were tense times in northern Utah. At one point, Brigham Young was under house arrest, and I believe it was also the time the Ann Eliza Young divorce was coming to a head. George Q. Cannon showed remarkable restraint in his comments.

Thank you for the explanation, Ardis. How proud you must be of your parents for their service.

And, btw, ‘international cohort’ sounds a bit Spanish Civil War to me, for some reason!!

It goes a little broader than that, in that it’s the traditional day to visit family graves, clean up cemeteries, take flowers, etc., for all loved ones, regardless of military connection, but it is still basically a day to remember the dead who served in the military (contrasted with Veterans Day on November 11, which is chiefly to honor the living).

Although few people follow it anymore, one Memorial Day tradition calls for American flags to be flown at half-staff in the morning as a sign of mourning, then raised at noon to full staff as, I suppose, a sign of victory. The graves of vets are also usually decorated with a flag — veterans’ groups and cemetery caretakers usually keep lists of vets in a given cemetery, and either the cemetery (as part of its perpetual care) or a community group furnishes the flags. This was actually a rather high concern on my father’s list — he wanted to be sure there was a flag on his grave every Memorial Day. There is. (There is also a little display on my living room table, with the flag that covered his casket, a pair of the white officers’ gloves worn by his funeral honor guard, and a shell fired in the salute at my mother’s funeral (both my parents served during WWII).

In my hometown and “Mormon colony” in Star Valley, Wyoming, we went to 3 different cemeteries (different wards had their own graveyards back in the day) to clean and decorate our great-grandparents graves and other relations’ headstones. We lingered longest in the biggest one in Afton WY which we went to last since that’s where everyone would meet mid-afternoon and then go to the nearby picnic ground for lunch.

Did you all know that some Southern states have “Confederate Memorial Day”? It’s on different days in the different states because they wanted their “own” holiday and not the “Union’s” day apparently.

It’s a state holiday on April 26th in Georgia (and Florida and Texas) although only my husband’s family and state government observes it anymore. But it used to be a big deal in the 20′s and 30′s according to my aged mother-in-law (back when the Confederate soldiers they honored were their grandparents and not great-greats they didn’t know personally.)

Allison in Atlanta

It was a family tradition I really loved because the SLC cemetery was so beautiful and it was interesting to learn about family members I never knew, as well as “visit” with those I did. There are a cluster of family graves in the SLC cemetery near some red steps that as a child, I thought very unusual and poetic.

I loved seeing the old, weathered sandstone grave markers and there were even wooden ones still extent. The pioneer past never seemed so close as on Memorial day.

It was also in the SLC cemetery that I first learned about the Japanese camps, since I asked my parents about the “strange” group of graves with not just flowers, but food left on them.

Of course, I also picked up on other lore by recognizing names from church or Utah history.

As I was “visiting” today, I found I remembered my way around the cemetery pretty well. Of course, I was there in 2007 when I was home doing research while on sabbatical. I spent a lot of my time in the cemetery though, thinking and walking. My maternal grandmother, a woman who was everything to me, was dying, and when I wasn’t with her, or working in archives, I was sitting in the cemetery playing Lyle Lovett’s cover of “Flying Shoes” on the car stereo and wishing…well, wishing all kinds of things.

I’m sure your visit with your grandparents this summer, Researcher, will make some beautiful memories.

And back to the topic of the GAR; a cousin and fellow Keepa reader put up a blog post a few days back that mentioned a GAR parade in Washington DC. The parade was attended by a common ancestor, John Hamilton Morgan, Civil War soldier, Utah educator, former president of the Southern States Mission, one of the Presidents of the Seventy, and state legislator. He was involved in Utah’s attempts at statehood but died in 1893. I hope Bessie doesn’t mind if I link to her post here. It has some pictures of a recent GAR memorial in the Salt Lake City Cemetery.