The James Family Plot in the Greeley Cemetery

Green Township, Alpena County, MI

 

 

After my grandfather T. Merrick Huston died in 1928 my grandmother remarried to James (Jimmie) James.  He was always Grandpa Jim to my sisters and me.  They continued to live in the Huston homestead, and my sister Kathy and I spent many a day with Grandma Jim while mom and dad were working planting strawberries or digging out stone-filled fencerows or whatever other excitement they were up to.  Grandma had an old table with a couple of boxes of buttons in it that caught my fancy.  I was always convinced that somehow they had overlooked a real treasure in among the buttons.  I used to sort through them when I was about four years old, looking for that missing treasure.

 

I was impressed by this little garden that they kept inside a sort of palisade fence.  I was only in it a few times, but it seemed to be a world apart from Alpena County in my four- or five-year old mind.  Somehow, even though grandma was only eleven when she emigrated to the U.S., it seemed she had kept a bit of the English garden sensibility.  Or at least, so I imagined.

 

Anyway, they were both planted in the Greeley Cemetery near the intersection of M-32 and southbound M-65.  Grandpa Jim’s daughter, Grace James, from his previous marriage is buried nearby.  Another son, Harley, also died recently (1999, I believe), but I do not currently know the location of their family plot.  My Uncle Bob Huston’s youngest son Joe Huston (named after his granddad and a couple of other generations of Joe Hustons before that) took these pictures of the Greeley gravesite in the summer of 2002.