Recently I joined the 'Find A Grave' site as a volunteer photographer. It's a fantastic site with tons of information for the researcher, and cemetery photos from all over the USA.
It's great to have the opportunity to return the favors of genealogy kindness and time given me in the past by generous strangers. Knowing the happiness of receiving that tid bit of information or photo that rounds out an ancestor is undescribable. I've thankful to be able to "Pass it forward"!
It's also the perfect opportunity to visit and appreciate all the local cemeteries and avoid that smile-and-step-back-slowly reaction by people who don't comprehend appreciating cemeteries. It's also kinda curious how many phobias and mind sets many people and a few of my relatives hold against cemeteries.
I have one relative...in-law actually, no blood relation, who tip-toes through a cemetery in fear of 'stepping on someone' and being 'dis-respectful'....I honestly don't think they care, but that's just me....
This same tip-toe-ing person, sneakily and with malice aforthought, took a hand spade into an old old cemetery early in the morning and dug out yellow iris tubers for her garden from beside someone's grave. When confronted, she just said, "I didn't take them all!" I told her MOM!....
I don't care much for newer sanitized-restricted-convenient for-the-groundskeeper cemeteries. I understand why it's done, but they just don't appeal to me.
I like walking an uneven path under large, graceful old trees that compliment the sometimes haphazard layout of monuments.. I love the play of shadow on the stones and ground. The architecture and landscaping are memorials standing to anchor families to their history and roots.
A person can observe and catlogue distinct eras of design in the stones, from primitive and plain to art deco and modern. Old cemeteries can be beautiful, peaceful, wild and overgrown, lonely, unique, somber...and some just bizaarly unique like the Chippiannock Cemetery in Rock Island, Illinois.
Regardless of character, cemeteries all give me a feeling of connection with history and family and some other feeling I can't find words to describe.
Loading up the camera, GPS, notepads, lunch and bob the dog and heading out to find a cemetery in Fullerton. It's 40 degrees!
