The Post-Hole Banks

In the days of the old west when ranches were huge affairs and financial institutions were few and far between, much cattle business was conducted with gold and silver coins. A historian and storyteller named J. Frank Dobie wrote a short piece called “The Post-Hole Banks” in which he told of Texas ranchers with coins on hand hiding them away from thieves who might come looking.  

     According to Dobie one method of safekeeping required pulling a corral fencepost from the ground, dropping a bag of coins in the hole, and then replacing the post. The location of the stash was sometimes forgotten because if the rancher had hidden them in the dark of a moonless night, he might need to pull out a number of posts to find it again. Possibly some bags of coins were still buried and forgotten when an owner died which caused treasure seekers to snoop around and start lifting posts.  

     Readers, please forgive the writer for what he is about to do when he construes a metaphor from the point of forgotten post-hole treasure with family history buried in graves. No matter the cost, we’ll run with it. It has to do with an unresolved line of family lost to me which my genealogy-inclined wife understood but I never quite grasped.

     Along Highway 46 at a spot between Leonard and Kindred stands the nicely maintained West Prairie Church and its cemetery on the north side of the road. It came to mind again when a posting on Facebook’s “North Dakota History of Cities, Towns, and Places” caught my eye. It pictured a large family dressed in their Sunday best. Placed there by a man named Norm Vangsness, he had added this description: “The Vangsnes clan about 20 yrs after settling in ND around the turn of the century.”

     I showed it to Mary who said, “Sure, they’re in the West Prairie cemetery and are your relatives. I think we took a picture of their gravestone.” Yep, after a short search we found the picture with the names Rev. Ole K. Vangsness and Christiana M. Vangsness carved into the marker; they were the ones on the picture; they are my great-great-grandparents. Then a clear picture started forming.

     They had a daughter named Helene, my great-grandmother. It so happens she is one of those few buried in that once almost forgotten Pioneer Cemetery in the sandhills east of Sheldon. She gave birth to my grandmother Clara and her brother Davy but died later after giving birth to a third child. Like so many gravestones of that era, hers was made of sandstone and the harsh elements of weather have taken a destructive toll on it. In the last few years we have made an annual visit to her grave to plant a flower. Happily and much to his credit, a volunteer groundskeeper maintains the site after a community group cleared and cleaned the overgrown site some twenty years ago.

     The blood line continued in my maternal grandmother’s life who was then buried in the nearby Helendale Cemetery and it has continued through my mother on to my grandchildren who we’ve updated about their great-great-great grandparents. 

     We haven’t yet met Norm Vangsness but have plans to do so in the future. He possesses a well-researched family history which he willingly shared with us. It arrived via email,  consists of fifty pages, and gave us some mighty informative reading.  From all its dates and names I can even prove that George Bunn and I are third cousins. The year 1500 points to the earliest entry which for me means fifteen generations ago. 

     Numbers of grandparents keep accumulating. Each one of us has four grandparents. Skip back, let’s say to the fifth generation where Ole and Kristianne reside on my family tree, that number now totals 128 grandparents. Hard to believe, but my personal genetics derive from that rather crowded field alongside the other relatives from my father’s side. Those people are buried in the past, much like a bag of gold in a post hole, valuable but lost, found only by digging.