Omigosh . . . when I was car shopping a while back I drove past the one on North River Street several times. And I was in W-B again in March to see Diana Krall in concert. Of course, that was at night.

My friend Christine and I should make a field trip to W-B when she gets back from vacation, if I get any time free from physical therapy (starts this coming week). Those numbers look a tad overwhelming, but I'm sure making even a small dent would be good.

Perhaps Mare in WB would like to take up a new hobby . . . ;-)

It would be so wonderful if you and Christine could take some of the requested photos. I know I'm always checking the requests for the cemeteries near me, but all of the requests are either claimed or fulfilled. It just breaks my heart to see so many requests in Luzerne County. My father's family came from Italy and ended up in Luzerne County (although a few went to Philadelphia), so I look at the FindAGrave listings quite often.

I just looked up the Wilkes-Barre City Cemetery because I know very well where that one is located. I remember thinking it looked intriguing when I drove past. FindAGrave says only 5% of its 16,000+ graves have been photographed. That's shocking. Strange that the W-B cemeteries have gotten so little attention from volunteers.

And you wouldn't have to worry about taking photos of headstones that have already been photographed!

My wife found some nteresting founding history about the Wilkes-Barre area while doing genealogy searches on her family. She is connected to The Hungerfords in colonial Connecticut. At that time, the Wikes-Barre area was known as the Wyoming Valley. Look up the Wyoming War between the Pennites and Yankees, the Pennites were of the Pennsylvania Colony and the Yankees were from Connecticut. A problem arose when the English King granted rights to both groups to occupy the same territory. Friction developed between two colonies when a group of Yankees tried to establish a settlement in the Wyoming Valley. They came to blows. The fracas was inturrupted by the Revolutionary War. Both groups suspended their hostilities to go fight for the Revolution. After that war, there were no more English colonies, many of the grants by the King became void, and any such occupation disputes fell to the newly formed "states" to deal with. The Wyoming War more or less faded away.

We never learned about this stuff in school.

There is a possibility of graves in that valley that date back to the 1770s.

Well, no one from either side of my father's family was in the United States in the 1700s. My husband's mother's side was in New York in the 1700s. (My father's side were all from Italy. I have no idea how or why they picked Wilkes-Barre or anywhere else in Luzerne County. My mother's side were mostly from Ireland, a few from England, and one or two from Germany. They all ended up in Minnesota.)

It's still called the Wyoming Valley (and there's a Wyoming Valley Mall). I never heard of that war, but I wonder if they teach it and other parts of local history in the schools there. As I mentioned in another thread, NYC schools taught us about New Amsterdam and its history when I was growing up. I was fascinated.