How important is your name? Woody Guthrie's songs answer the question.

Hidden beside rural roads and in hay meadows and woods across the Ozarks are weathered headstones and simple stones that mark old graves.

Here's one of those simple, anonymous stones placed in the midst of "modern" slick-faced headstones with carefully-chiseled names, dates and other information in the Omaha Cemetery. Does any living soul know the name of the person buried in this spot?

This stone marks a grave in Bellefonte Cemetery. Deciphering the data on this stone would take more effort than we were willing to invest on a chilly March Sunday. We also would need just a little luck to correctly identify the grave.

An entire section of Davidson Cemetery, near Crooked Creek between Harmon and Zinc, is marked by row after row of carefully lined up shards of rocks.
Who is buried there?
What are their names?
Why did they die?
What were their ages?
Names for remains buried in that area may still be known by descendants, but they are the only people keeping those memories alive … until they are gone.
So what is in a name?
 

We attended an Arlo Guthrie concert earlier this spring, and the Woodstock icon repeatedly emphasized his father’s insistence that names are important.

Arlo said the importance of identifying people by their names was one of three reasons behind Woody Guthrie's lyrics to the song “Deportee.”

The three points are:
- The inhumanity of the government paying farmers to destroy food to drive up commodity prices, rather than feeding hungry people around the world.- The injustice of bringing Mexican farm workers into the United States to plant, hoe and pick our crops, then deporting them back to Mexico.
- The national media’s apathy for the names and identities of Mexican farm laborers who died in an airplane crash.
While names of the American crew were listed in national news accounts, the Mexican victims were grouped together under the classification “deportees.”
That’s why he addressed those victims in the “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” as: “Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita; adiós, mis amigos, Jesús y María...”

The same insistence on addressing each victim by name also compelled Woody Guthrie to list each victim on the Reuben James, the first U.S. naval ship sunk by German U-Boats during World War II.

Sure, that made the song too long for commercial success, until singers shortened all those names into the chorus, “Tell me, what were their names?”

Walking in the Gillioz Theater in downtown Springfield, Missouri, on Sunday night, a young lady with a camera asked if she could take a picture of us.

After snapping our picture, she handed us a business card for the Springfield News-Leader and asked us our names … of course. Now we feel like Hollywood stars with our faces identified and our names correctly spelled on the newspaper's website. Anyone want our autographs?

We all have a name for a reason … not a pronoun or a description of our jobs, of our appearance, of our age or of our nationality.  Our mamas and daddies loved us enough to ponder what names they should give us, so we should at least respect that effort.

Even this more than 150-year-old headstone in Crossroads Cemetery is legible: It says the headstone is in memory of James W. Beck, Born April 9, 1837, died April 12, 1862.

Still in Crossroads Cemetery, we stop at the carefully chiseled headstone of Julia A. Wife of W.J. Turney. Born in Alabama Nov. 3, 1936, and died Oct. 7, 1877. The capstone on the grave is missing, and we have no idea what the abbreviation at the top of the stone means.

Tracing threads on Google search, the abbreviations apparently are symbolic of Heroines of Jericho, according to a member of the organization. The lettering in the middle is the name of a grip for the Master mason's Daughter degree.
The lettering around it is a catechism that is recited between the Heroine and the Knight (Master Mason) upon meeting, once a particular sign is given.
Another commentator said TKCFND could be the first letters of a prayer. OSB may be "Order of St Benedict"  or 'Ordinis Sancti Benedict' or the first letters of Latin words from a prayer.  
Another commentator made us squeamish with a translation of V R S N S M V - S M Q L I V B -- initial letters of a Latin prayer of exorcism against Satan: Vade retro Satana! Nunquam suade mihi vana! Sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas! (Begone Satan! Never tempt me with your vanities! What you offer me is evil. Drink the poison yourself!)

Again, we couldn't find the name for the remains inside this crypt, just the name of the person who reworked the Bellefonte Cemetery so many years ago.

We'll revisit these cemeteries and visit some others in search of one-of-a-kind headstones.
There are always adventures to follow, especially in our cryptic curiosity. 

Megan and Dwain