Chance and Happenstance

Why do people end up where they do? We found ourselves in Oakville Tuesday morning because we were ready for a day off from our list of chores and we wanted to get out of the city. We don't traditionally visit graves on Memorial Day, but we decided a good way to get out into the countryside would be to go look up some ancestors. We had been to these cemeteries before, but it had been a long time, and now we could take digital photos of the grave markers for Tom's files. Oakville is a little old town out on the prairie south of Olympia, about a 90 minute drive from Seattle. Not much is left there now, but they do have a post office and a grocery store. Tom's great grandfather, John Vandervort, came here about 1897. We're not really sure why. Maybe friends or family from Pennsylvania had come here first. He was a widower with children, and he had a harness and cobbler shop in town, while doing logging on the side to support his family. He and three of his four sons are buried in the Oakville Cemetery. Tom is descended from one of his three daughters. We found the graves and some of their other relatives as well. We were getting ready to leave when a car arrived and two men got out. They walked toward the same graves. I told Tom that we should wait and see where they were headed. There were no other people in the cemetery. Sure enough they stopped at the grave of one of the sons of John Vandervort. So of course we went over to talk to them. Well, chance and happenstance placed us there together. The older man was the grandson of John Vandervoort and the son of James Vandervoort. His name was Jim ( James) and so was his son's, the man who had brought him to the cemetery that day, because they couldn't make it on Memorial Day and the younger Jim had business in the area. We had never met them and didn't really know anything about them. The cousins stood and talked for quite a while. It was a special opportunity that could only have happened by chance.