He was born the year after the Mayflower landed...

Wow. It really says something that a gravestone, carved with care but otherwise derived from a hand-carved, very rough-hewn piece of slate or granite, could carry an entirely legible, if short, record of Roger Baster's age upon his passing, exact date of death, and what sounds almost along the lines of being one of the first adherents of the 7th Day Adventists (or a church observing the day thus), and carry it to a future three hundred and thirty years away in time afterwards. I know something like that (having a headstone both intact and easily read) is perhaps up to what good luck it had not to be knocked over, damaged by farming implements, or simply have the writing worn away to the point of conveying little if anything, but it's still impressive to consider the history that's come and gone since this man was put in the ground and this stone erected to keep some memory there alive of him.

I wonder sometimes if there are descendants of this man, if a family line was kept since then (assuming he had children, or had brothers or sisters who did) and a man or woman of our own time could stand before the stone and above the grave of a distant, but direct ancestor. I marvel at the fact that the grave of my great-great-grandparents (my grandmother's maternal grandparents) is barely twenty minutes from my home, and have visited it many times, simply to be in such a place, where the sod of their soil-tomb has lain undisturbed for more than eighty years (my great-great-grandfather was buried there in 1901, and his wife, my great-great-grandmother in 1932) in a graveyard still kept tidy and safe, they and others of my city's past together and secure. While I understand that my ancestral family branches didn't reach North America prior to the early 18th Century (my great-great-grandparents were born in the 1840s in Buckinghamshire, England, and came here to pre-Confederation Canada in the 1850s after they married, as an example I am considerably familiar with), to think I could find a direct trace to an ancestor more than three hundred years before my own time, and to find the burial and a legible inscription itself, would be something of extreme interest to me.

Thank you for sharing this with us, GC!

-2Paw.