A gift from Grandpa/Porterville Utah Cemetery

Last year I did a ancestry DNA test, I knew most of my family history but I was still surprised when my DNA report came back with a large percentage of French DNA. I had no idea I had any French yet here I was looking at a report that showes it is what the majority of my DNA is.

In doing some investigating I found that my paternal great grandmother’s family was from France before immigrating to Canada. My 2x great grandfather had changed his name from LeBlanc to White when he came to the United States and I had previously hit a wall tracing that line.

As I did more investigating, I found that my paternal great great grandparents had lived and were buried in Porterville Utah. Porterville is literally next door to Milton where my maternal grandparents live and I have spent countless hours.  I decided on my next trip to Utah I would visit the cemetery.

As it turns out I found myself flying to Utah to attend a funeral in March so I told my sister lets go see if we can find the Porterville cemetery and our grandparents headstones.

I flew in from Alaska, walked out of the airport to meet my sister and promptly realized I had left my sunglasses back home, I figured I would have to go buy a new pair. We headed up to the cemetery, found it with no problems and quickly made our way to the headstones we were looking for.

The Porterville cemetery is an old pioneer cemetery located up on a hill, it is small, a bit overgrown and filled with mostly very old headstone with a few newer ones here and there. Our great great granparents William and Ellen ( Smethurst) White are buried side by side with Ellen’s parents Aaron and Catherine ( Green) Smethurst behind them. We visited for a bit, wandered the rest of the cemetery and then headed back to the car. As we were leaving the cemetery, we noticed a mailbox right next to the flag, there is a sign that says please sign in. My sister opened the mailbox to retrieve the “visitor book” and laughed, then said to me, “ look here I think grandpa left you some sunglasses”. Sure enough right on top of the visitor book was a pair of black and white sunglasses ( perfect for my weekend funeral attire), covered in dust as if they had been there awhile. I said a quick “thank you grandpa” and vowed to return, bringing the sunglasses back in case someone showed up looking for them (unlikely due to the amount of dust) and off we went.

I found the headstones to be very interesting, both sets of my grandparents as well as other headstones in the cemetery had the same set of holding hands carved on them. I had never seen that before ( and I have wandered A LOT of cemeteries) so I wanted to figure out what it meant. In researching that I found that this symbol dates back to the Victorian era, if the hands are masculine and feminine and clasped together it represents marriage/and eternal bond between the couple.

I have since learned a great deal about my grandfather William White and have a trip to Canada planned for next year to see where he spent his early years.