Answers and Kudos

Thanks to everyone who's posted comments recently. Kudos to Jen for knowing that the Hollywood sign used to say "Hollywoodland", and semi-kudos to lint monkey for taking the trouble to look it up. Kudos to Grandpa Fordham for immediately recognizing Great Falls on the Potomac River just west (upstream) from Washington D.C. Thanks to Jen and Nicole for good guesses. The photos were taken from overlooks in Great Falls Park, the Virginia side of Great Falls National Park in Maryland. This park is just west of the Washington Beltway. To reach it, you get off the beltway onto the George Washington Parkway a couple miles north of Tison's corner, just before you go across the Potomac River bridge. Take the parkway west a couple of miles and turn right at the sign for Great Falls Park, about a mile before you get to the village of Great Falls, Virginia. It normally costs a couple of dollars to get in, but I have an annual National Park Pass which gets me in free to all the National Parks. It's well worth the money, however. Kudos to Sgaterboy for recognizing the Embraer 170 aircraft from just its wingtip and the front surface of the engine nacelle. Now that's knowing your aircraft! And in response to Bopnopper, neither the Baltimore cemetery nor the Greenmount cemetery are as pretty as the Belgian cemeteries, because neither of these have any flowers in them. Baltimore cemetery doesn't even have any trees. Almost everyone in these cemeteries has been dead for more than 75 years, most more than 150 years, some for almost 200 years, and no one puts flowers out anymore. They are not kept up, except for general grass mowing. Notice how crooked and dilapidated the stones are. And to answer Music7's email, we have no idea why the Singewalds didn't want their graves marked. They certainly had the money. But even the son who moved to Florida (my great-grandfather John Lawrence) is buried in an unmarked grave in Jacksonville, and what's more, all three of his children (including my grandmother) are in completely unmarked graves, no stones or markers whatsoever. Puzzling. Genealogy research turns up some fun riddles and puzzles. One of the most intriguing has to do with my great-grandmother Rowell's parentage. And there's another puzzle involving my Creek indian ancestor, where her purported age at the time of the incident doesn't jive with the historical dates of Jackson's trail of tears ... more investigation is obviously needed. Fun, fun, fun.