I am also in cemeteries a lot! The stories are so sad. So many died so young of infections that today would be easily treated. I am a VP of Bucks County Genealogical Society and we are doing a cemetery project of taking pics of all our cemeteries and having a description of each on our web site. We don't take pics of every headstone like for Find A Grave but we want to be another resource for people looking for the graves of their ancestors. What you do is so important!
Joann

I'll bet you have some wonderful old cemeteries in Bucks County, Joann! I was speaking to someone at a funeral home the other day, and she said she wished the Boy Scouts would make an Eagle Scout project involving mapping one of the oldest cemeteries to enable people to locate the graves. I told her to take a Boy Scout Leader to lunch. :-)

alisande, I admire your spirit of giving and sharing to explore old graveyards and provide information for the benefit of others. As with the other recent thread, I'm sure you happen upon many interesting stories.

It's a reminder to me of how puzzling I find the compulsive interest some have in accumulating information about their ancestors. I know of the one religious group for which family history is important, and that they generously provide a lot of information for non-members to use. But otherwise, I guess I just don't see the point of it.

Your heading is profound, every picture does tell a story. Many souls pass through the world of life, each with a story. To me, these poorly maintained cemeteries also tell a story - not enough people care about those stories nor keep in touch with the resting places of their ancestors. I don't think that's going to change.

Some people are passionate about genealogy, and others couldn't care less. There's no explaining either position. (Although the term "compulsive interest" could be applied to just about any serious hobby, including cooking.)

It reminds me of the issue of adopted children seeking out their biological parents. If I were adopted, I'd leave no stone unturned to find out all I could. My husband felt just the opposite: "Why bother?" :-)

I haven't done a lot with genealogy myself. I can't justify the expense of an Ancestry membership, and I have more than enough other projects going on. But my father's family had an unusual name and lots of talent, so it's been fun finding mention of them all over the Internet. And thanks to other people's work, shared online, I was able to trace one line back to the 1700s. Some KT friends have helped a lot, too, providing me with information I could never have found on my own.

As for my mother's family, I haven't a clue. I've never seen the name(s) mentioned anywhere, and I never had a chance to ask her about them since she died so young.

Right, I guess I'm in the "couldn't care" group.

I think it can be an easy call to distinguish between someone who's enthusiastic or even passionate about a hobby, and someone who's compulsive about it. I chose the word deliberately. I've run into some for whom finding an ancestor's details (that were really of no use and often of no interest to other family members) had become an obsession. Haven't you?

If I had been raised by adoptive parents, I would probably hope to have enough background health information as would be useful for me medically, but nothing more. I hope these days the adoption agencies do a better job of making that kind of information available, it really does matter. How I would have felt about it as a kid, I don't know.

Do keep snapping those photos, I'm sure there are plenty of folks who are appreciate your efforts.

Ah, Snidely, often I agree with your posts, but other times I do not. This is one of the times that I do not. "It's a reminder to me of how puzzling I find the compulsive interest some have in accumulating information about their ancestors.

My parents were married in January 1947. My mother was 30, my father was 33. They met in Panama -- my mother was a social worker with the Red Cross, and my father was in the medical corps in the Army. Because my father was career Army, we moved a lot -- even living in Europe for a few years. Therefore, we didn't live near other family members (my mother's family was in Minnesota, my father's in Pennsylvania). Because we didn't grow up near family, we didn't have big family dinners or get-togethers where there would have been discussions about other folks in the family. I didn't get to play with my cousins where there might have been discussions about other family members. All of my grandparents died when I was young and even my parents died when I was young (I was 20 when my mother died, then a couple weeks later I turned 21 and a couple weeks after that my father died). So, there is much of my family history that I do not know.

To me, knowing about my ancestors is knowing more about myself -- what came before me helped to make me the person that I am. The beliefs and values of my ancestors were handed down through the generations.

There is so much I want to know about my ancestors -- including who they were!

Alisande, you now have Snidely's permission to keep "snapping those photos"......what a relief, I'm sure. :-)

Lindsay, I'm very sorry your family members left your life (and their own) much too soon and too young. I won't presume to suggest how you should or shouldn't feel.

What I had in mind was different though, those who pursue information about ancestors of many generations back, as if it mattered. I guess perhaps to them it does, but I'd say, it's to no end.

Hey Rhizo,

Awesome! I think we all could produce profound prose given enough time and talent. My comment, that you found a need to share your thoughts about, was my way of saying that my puzzlement had nothing to do with what alisande does, but was rather directed at some among the community that uses such information. She drives around, enjoys the outdoors (cemeteries being not too different from golf courses) and performs a public service. I'm sure many find that very activity an attractive pastime.

Lindsey, I had a small family too. I was an only child, and when my mom died when I was 9, there were just two of us for awhile. She had two sisters, but they lived in other states. No big family dinners for us either. Two of my grandparents died before I was born, and one lived out of state.

I got pretty good at connecting with my cousins after I grew up, and one reason why I love Facebook is that it has enabled me to connect with other cousins. We have shared much with each other.

Thank you for the support, Snidely, but I have to say cemeteries are very different from golf courses. Cemeteries have a atmosphere of peace and reflection that is unique. I live on 31 acres and have plenty of reasons to be outdoors; it is not the outdoors I'm thinking of when I walk slowly through a cemetery.

The gravestones that I photograph were erected so that people, once loved, would be remembered. You could say I'm remembering.

It's hard not to remember the person buried when you walk through a cemetery...Living in the Boston area there are many cemetery's that the public is invited to walk through and visit the graves of many famous people from "way back when". but Honestly it was the people that were not so famous that I really enjoyed meeting ..the gravestones really do tell the story of their lives...or of enough of it to get to know that a young woman died in childbirth or that two children died of some illness together...I think walking through a cemetery is a time well spent.

Gravestones tell a lot, but no stories for me longer than 5 minutes. Got my own family to chase, if and when ambition dictates such. Dead people aren't going anywhere. It's the living that create difficulty.

I like a good story. Genealogy research helps put together history, your family and their place in it. It sometimes help explain why your family ended up where they did and why they do what they do. I have a family line that has some pretty wild stories. Research has given me some answers and a few more wild stories. I need to write it up some day.

You should do that, Adellabedella.

That's just the way I feel about it, Ruthie. (Sorry, I missed your post the first time around.)

we have some in the strangest places. one and the stones are almost all toppled in one way or another, is surrounded by a business complex...the first time we went by thought it was a "Halloween" site! we have (in the city limits) at least 4+, including one for quakers....(Farmington mi)

Alisande...my father married his first wife...Helen they had one daughter they named Virginia. 18 months later Helen died giving birth to their second child. A son they named Joseph.
My dad needed help with the two small children. So my mother was hired as a live in nanny.
I don't know how long after she came to take care of them before they married.
They had several miscariages. Then finally had a son they named Gary ....I think he lived a couple days before he died.
Then I was born. Seven years later my mother died. Virginia lived most of her childhood with her mothers family. Joe was raised to be a teenager with my mother but I don't know about what happened until he was grown.
I was raised with my mothers sister. They have all passed now. My dad lived into his 80s. He drank most of the rest of his life. I don't blame him.

But there is no story on their stone. Just names and dates.

I don't know where his first wife was laid to rest.

I used to walk through a very old cemetary in Lancaster Texas.

It was beautiful, & peaceful, & that's where I first saw the very old iris florentina (found in the early 1600's I think) in bloom.

One 'story' sticks in my mind:

There's a big square family plot, seems like the name is Campbell, & the man was a "Reverend".

but there are (if I remember correctly) 3 little graves in that plot with a different name, say it was Harris;
their parents were listed, & neither parent was a Campbell.

The children's places of birth were shown;
none of them had been born in Texas;
2 of them had been born in one state, & the 3rd in another state.

It seems like all the children died in the 1930's, during the Depression;
epidemics ran through whole populations, & fragile children died in droves.

For years, I wondered about the story.

I thought that maybe the "Harrises" had lived in one state when their first child was born, then had to move on & the second child was born in another state, etc, & they ended up in Texas, where they lost these children within a very short time.

They would have been destitute, no money for funerals & markers.

Maybe the Campbells gave them the spaces in their own family plot.

The parents weren't buried there, so they must have moved on again.

One lovely spring day, I took a friend with me on my walk & showed her the Campbell plot & told her my thoughts...

& she said, "Oh, yes. Here it is."

The whole story was inscribed on the opposite sides of the markers!

very sad but with some touching kindness.

The Campbells had helped them as much as they could.

When you do know your family and at least some family lore, and when family has 'claimed' you as having inherited this or that physical trait or talent...you can't imagine what it feels like to have *nothing* of the sort. Worse, you may have been adopted by parents who want to pretend you had no other parents or ancestors. The parents forget about adoption. The adoptee is reminded daily by the 'claiming' that goes on all around him -- as others go about normal, non-adopted lives and write up school assignments on My Family Tree.

The non-adopted have no way to know about the scant information and outright lies in agency records. Think 'sales'. Maternity homes and adoption agencies have provided livelihoods for social workers, attorneys, and courts for many decades. Even if truth was recorded, what medical history do you hear from a frightened 15-year-old girl?

As for genealogy, it does make history 'personal'. It's a fun mystery to put limbs on your family tree, but it's not usually 'ancestor worship'. (It can't be, when you are constantly finding records that debunk family myths.)

While researching my ancestors in Illinois, I found a similar story in a cemetery. There were the headstone of Mom and Pop and aligned in a neat row were stones for 5 little ones who ranged from a few days old to 1.5 years. Several had died before the birth of the next child. This couple did go on to have 2 more children who lived. I can't imagine the heartbreak and misery they must have endured. These deaths were in the late 1800s in a farming community.