Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Cemeteries

Cemeteries can hold a lot of information. Tombstones can tell you little secrets about your relatives. Such as a deer on the tombstone, probably means that the person loved hunting.
A fish on a tombstone ,maybe he or she loved fishing. I have seen tombstones with big trucks on them, one even had a bread truck, and yes he worked for a bakery driving trucks.
Some parts of the cemetery will hold a large tombstone and all little ones around it, those were the children. Many tombstones have the couple and their date of marriage. That is very important if you are doing your family tree or genealogy. In genealogy, you cannot search parish records after a certain date, so a cemetery is a good place to check out, you sometimes do find the dates you are looking for, the birth, the death, the age, the date of marriage. I have also seen tombstones of a person saying that this person was born elsewhere. Some were born in Ireland and died in Canada, others born in Newfoundland, and died in New Brunswick.
As I walk through the cemetery and I see all the names on the stones, I wonder about these people that are buried there. They lived their lives and died but that is not all there was to those persons, in between the living and dying they had a life, they loved, they hurt and they had happiness and they had sorrow. So if you go into a cemetery, look at the wealth of information there is there, sometimes they have epitaths, if you read them, some are very interesting.
Sometimes you stumble upon some stones that will tell you about tragedies, and that is sad.
Anyway today I went to the cemetery, but this time not to browse the cemetery names, no today I went to my Dad's gravesite to let him know I have not forgotten him, he passed away five years ago today. So Dad rest in peace.
Thanks for the lovely visit, do stop by again, and when you go into a cemetery remember this blog.
Have a great day
Aline

2 comments:

Elaine said...

My mother and I took a trip to NB Canada, after my mother’s sister died in 1997. I wanted to take, my mother to where she was born, and to all the places where we had memories. We really enjoyed our time. I was also looking for family tree information. It seemed that everyone we bumped into, in the upper part of NB, were near or distant cousins. They were all very friendly and helpful. We were stopping at every graveyard that we came upon, to look at tombstones, to see if there were any of our family names and we found many of them.
We saw a woman in the middle of nowhere, alone picking blueberries, in a field next to a graveyard, that we had just visited. This was in Kouchibouquac, where my grandparents once lived. I stopped to talk to her. She spoke in French; fortunately we could understand her Acadian French. I told her that I was looking for family tree information. She asked me what my relative’s names were. It so happened that, she was related to us. My mother and her grandmother were cousins. She was also in charge of the Daigle family reunion. She invited us to her place, to meet her grandmother, as most acadians do. We couldn't go because my cousin was driving and she wanted to go home. We exchanged addresses. She wrote to both of us and sent me our family tree information. We kept in touch with each other, she sent us pictures of her family (our cousins). WE met so many nice people. We found relatives names in every graveyard that we stumbled on. We went to many villages and looked at land that once belong to our ancesters. I have maps that show where they once owend land.
We even found my mothers godmother still living in a nursing home. She was so thrilled. We enjoyed the trip so much that I took my mother on another trip a couple of years later and that one included Quebec. My mother died in 2005 in Ont. Canada. I miss her so much. But I am glad that we had a a chance to do this together. And I will always cherish that memory. Elaine

alineskee said...

Elaine thanks for sharing your memories. And it is a good feeling to walk on the land your ancestors walked on, or see their names on tombstones, it make all of genealogy so very real, to know these people lived, loved like we do and because of them , we are here. And cherish all the memories you have of your parents or grandparents.
Aline