“Cemeteries are like family albums. They commemorate the lives of the people who have gone before us.” – Janice Cooper
I'm going to take a break from my usual "crime" and "tragedy" posts with this blog. Those are the topics that I seem to enjoy so I tend to post more of those than anything else. But today is going to be a little something different.
One of the most unrecognized sources of our history is our cemeteries. In fact one of my favorite past times in the spring and fall is to stroll through a cemetery and just look at the monuments.
Almost every grave that is marked has a birth year and a death year. In between those two dates is a "dash" mark. That dash represents the life that person lived. Who were they? What did they do in their lifetime? To whom were they related? What role did they play in the community? What part of significant events did they play? What was their day to day life like? So many questions that you can get from just looking at a gravestone. But it doesn't end there.
Jot down that person's name. Bring it home and plug it into an internet search engine and see what you can find. I do this a lot in genealogy research if I think the person is related to me. But I also will just search some random person if their gravestone just intrigued me for whatever reason.
In our family cemetery there is one stone that just kept puzzling me. The person's last name was a name that is prominent in my family tree. But to my knowledge at the time, I didn't think he was related. I asked my Mom and she didn't know anything about the individual at all. One day I was at the cemetery and once again I was just drawn to his gravestone. So I came back home and used the internet to see what I could find. This gentleman had served in World War II, was a Purple Heart recipient, and was considered a "Hero of World War II." I would have never known that if I had not researched it. A World War II hero buried in our family cemetery. And it turns out he was related to me distantly.
There is another grave in our family cemetery. The occupant of that grave played a role in a historical feud that took place in our county in the late 1800's. I would not have known that either if I had not become curious about him and researched it.
Sadly, many of our local cemeteries have become abandoned and forgotten. I know one that the gravestones have become completely earth covered. You can find no trace of them even. You would not even know a cemetery was there if you were just walking through the field. Another cemetery where some of my ancestors are buried is completely monumentless. There is not a single stone there. Why? I don't know. Perhaps the families chose that for religious purposes. I don't know. As a result no one will ever know a cemetery is even there in a few years. Most probably don't know it now even.
In 2014, Mom and I set out on a journey to find an old abandoned cemetery in our community. We had both heard about this cemetery our entire lives. But neither of us had been there. So we set out to find it. It took two days to find it, but we did.
The cemetery was out in the woods. It had been completely cut off from any major highway. The only way to get to it was walk great distances through the woods. No one had been there in decades most likely. It was a small cemetery with only about eight graves or so. And only three of them were marked.
One of the marked graves, when I researched it, was the grave of a Civil War soldier. If he could speak to us from his grave could you imagine the stories he could tell about his experiences in that war?
The other one was the grave of his son.
The other marked grave was the grave of a stillborn infant. When I did some research I found that he too was distantly related. After he passed, his parents moved to Washington State where they are buried.
I know I've probably rambled more than I've made sense here. But I encourage you to go stroll through an old forgotten cemetery. Jot down some of the names and then research them. You will be surprised at the history that you can find by doing that.
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