Monday, May 08, 2006

Yesterday the weather was nice, decided on the spurt of the moment to take my camera and go to an old cemetery about two miles from my home and transcribe the stones. So off I went, parked my car in the cemetery, brought my briefcase in case I needed a pen.
The cemetery is in Saint Antoine , it is the oldest of two catholic cemeteries, so I was curious to see if I had any ancestors buried there. I took the picture of a large cross at the front of the cemetery, but when I tried to take photos of the stones, the sun was too bright and the photos were not good, and some of the stones were to hard to see the writings. So off to the car I went, got out a book and a pen and started from the front , copied all that I could from the stones. I never thought I could do the entire cemetery in one day , but I did the entire cemetery except for a few stones in the far back, of the children, but I am returning to do those too. It is a shame that so many tombstones were broken and just laying there. I wish I could have lifted some of them but they were too heavy. I don't know if the village will restore the stones but I sure hope so. There were fifteen rows in the cemetery , some rows had 12 stones some had 20, now I need to recopy them , since I was in a hurry and it was getting late, I used my own shorthand for instance, Goguen became Gog, Robichaud became Rob, LeBlanc became LeB, so as you can see I took shortcuts in order to get it done, by the time I was finished the winds had picked up and blowing my book pages. But all in all it was worth a little effort on my part and a job that needed to be done for others doing genealogy like me.
Have a great day

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