Cemeteries

[out_of_the_ordinary]

The snow finally melted off, but will be back in a few days. Yesterday I really should have finished raking those leaves the snow had been covering, but now I realize how addictive genealogy is...we spent the afternoon walking through cemeteries!

 

Old local cemeteries where we had never been and were clueless on where to look! We found many in DH's line. He doesn't have contact with family and when he was younger, his family didn't visit graves. He had no idea where any of his family was laid to rest. So this has been quite the hunt. It is good we did this yesterday. The info on the headstones is so valuable!

 

I was saddened by how many stones were there for infants...and those were just the ones with markers. And it is sad that so much history is being lost with the broken, worn-smooth, toppled over and sunken stones. I'm glad we are getting this info while it is still there!

[Cat]

Don't forget to take paper and crayons to make "rubbings" of the stones of relatives, if you want. Or take pictures.

 

What first opened my eyes to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918/1919 was visiting a cemetery and finding an unusually high number of young children who died in those years. I wondered why, and when I learned about the Spanish Flu, I saw the connection.

 

Childhood was much more dangerous all those years ago, too, even without the flu. And bearing children was, too, and those deaths do not stand out quite as easily in a cemetery as the children's deaths.

 

 

 

[Momo]

If you can't get there in person you might find alot of tombstone pics here. I was amazed at how many from my family were here.

 

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gs&

[Door#3]

Thank you for the link! I found pictures of my Revolutionary War ancestor's grave and his pension application! Funny to find he was part of the people who trimmer another part of the tree. But that's history for you. When I have some time I hope to sit down with my grandmother's genealogy book and save all of the information I find on my tree.

[out_of_the_ordinary]

Momo,

 

That site is wonderful! It helped me a great deal with my family research. I've joined (it's free) and have been adding graves and info to it.

 

Cat,

 

We took pics and next time I plan on taking paper and crayons and aluminum foil and a towel with us. I was reading that you can hold the foil on the stone and gently rub over it with a towel to get inscriptions that are worn/difficult to read and there's no harm to the stone. There's what I believe to be a stone for a child with one of my husband's family names on it (barely legible). The only other part I could read was "Oktober 18?? Yup, October with a "k". The family name is a German name, so maybe that is why. I couldn't make out the last two numbers of the year. I really want to try the foil method on that one.

 

I didn't even think of all the mothers that died...

[Snowmom]

 

Thank you for posting this info. We visited grave yards and that was what we had intended to do with one vacation. We found a lot of our families and there were some we could not find that were to have been buried in the cemetery we were at.

 

Yes, there were a lot of children who never made it to the age of 2 or 3 even. There were a lot of deaths due to the flu and such. Yes, Mothers died along with children a lot of the time.