During the summer of 1998 I went through a season of reevaluating my life, taking stock of where I had come from and where I wanted to focus my energy. Part of this process included a renewed interest in family history. I spoke to relatives, visited family gravesites, and visited the local library.  I visited what I thought was Chases Mills Cemetery, but found out is actually Riverhill. I remembered coming here every memorial day with my mom as a small child, learning to walk gingerly around the graves of people I could not see and had never met, though their blood runs through my veins. I could sense my mother loved and held these in high regard. I remember the carpeting of tiny flowers that profusely covered a good deal of the upper left hand corner of the little old cemetery where my maternal Grandmother, clearly my mother's most treasured departed one, rested peacefully. My mother called them May flowers and inevitably quoted, "April the showers bring May flowers". When she was still with us I found her repetitive quotes annoying, especially as a teen. Not so much theses days.
Ever faithfully blooming down in the very lower left hand corner of the weary yet charming old graveyard, I intensely desired to pluck up some the sweet lily of the valley, but I understood it was forbidden to take flowers away from this place, and the tiny flowers appeared just the same every year. The rose bush was just as constant a friend, and every spring time blossomed delicately pink with the deeper pink buds. I loved he tiny buds the best. These were directly in back of the larger important looking headstone middle way down the same left hand side of the yard. I am surprised at the resiliency and enduring genetic heritage of such plants. The pink rose bush had always been there as long as my mother could remember, and in the spring of 2007, my three year old granddaughter saw them there. Revisiting the peaceful place after my mother's passing eleven years earlier, these memories were my guide in that summer in 1998.
Aunt Martha and Aunt Eva both confirmed to me that although nothing but fragrant bunches of lilacs along with fresh faced daisies in coffee cans marked their graves seasonally, directly across from Grammy Emma and Grandfather Frank, Emma's mother and father, Julia Marie Burns Ashe, and Walter Ashe were also laid to rest. So who were the rest of these marked graves that seemed significant during the childhood visits?
I took down the names and dates and it wasn't long before I figured out five generations of Ashes were buried here. My mother, Evelyn Phoebe Berwick Tripp, since 1987 had joined the rest. Evelyn's mother and father, Emma Bertha Davis Ashe Berwick, along with her husband Frank Bazil (Basil?) Berwick. Emma's mom and dad with no grave markers at all were Walter R. Ashe and Julia Burns. Julia's relatives are buried in Hebron, Maine, while Walter's are, ah ha!, down in the lower left hand lily of the valley corner, Benjamin F. Ashe and Sarah Keen. Then the rose bush people were John Ashe, etched proudly on his tombstone is the phrase, "born in Scotland", and Polly Richardson, apparently equally proudly, was "born in Buckfield".

I went to the visit my mother's grave, who died much too young, with my then teenage daughter. After placing flowers near her headstone, I followed the path through the old cemetary, by the same route which my mother had always led me. Her mother and father to the left, across were her granparents. Her paternal great-granparents, I remembered, were way down in the exact lower left of the graveyard, where every spring lily of the valley plants faithfully blossom. This was the grave of Benjamin F. Ashe and for the first time I noted that his wife was Sarah Keen. A couple of rows up and to the right , the delicately blooming rose bush marked the grave of his parents, 'John Ashe, Born in Scotland,' and, ' Polly Richardson', just as proudly, ' Born in Buckfield', the nearby village.

With a little bit of research at the Auburn Public  Library,  I discovered Sarah was a direct descendant of Anne Little, daughter of Richard Warren of the Mayflower.  I was hooked!  My daughters and I, and often their friends along for the ride, explored a myriad of cemetaries throughout that summer, even finding the private 'Bonney Yard', where Joshua Keen, who fought in the Revolutionary War, along with his wife Abigail Eames were laid to rest. As you probably well know, the research goes on.. and on...