Hidden in Plain Sight

 You have to know the past to understand the present.
Carl Sagan


Over the weekend, I attended a funeral visitation in a part of town I don't go to often. After I finished at the church, I took some time to drive around the area. It is filled with large and stately old homes, some in need of repair, but the neighborhood has good bones. You can just feel the history around you.

Maybe that wasn't a random observation. As I sat in the church parking lot, it occurred to me that a branch or two of my family once lived in this area, something I've picked up from looking at old census records. I decided that someday it might be interesting to map out a drive to see if any of their old homes are still standing.

 Then I remembered that several ancestors are buried in what I thought was a small cemetery nearby. My GPS indicated it was only a few minutes away, so I thought I'd make a quick visit.

Now it may sound like a terrible thing to say, but I really don't like cemeteries -- or at least the ones where I've had to go on the worst days of my life.  I find it extremely difficult to visit my parents' graves so I hardly ever go, and I feel very guilty about that. My mom and dad were so full of life that a cemetery is the very last place I want to associate with them. 

So given my strong feelings on the subject, it might seem hypocritical that I actually wanted to visit a cemetery where my ancestors are buried. But people who research their family history routinely visit cemeteries as part of gathering information and paying respect. And since I didn't know any of these people, I don't feel the emotional kick-in-the-gut I get when I go to my parents' cemetery. I know that my mom and dad (and especially my grandma, who was the family genealogist) would appreciate that I'm trying to learn more about our family history, so I put aside my guilty feelings and off I went.

When I arrived at the cemetery, I discovered that it wasn't a small place at all. In fact, it stretched across the highway into two large areas. Since it was so much bigger than I expected and I was there mostly on a whim, I just took a quick drive through to see if i could spot any family plots.

Before arriving, I had checked a website called Find A Grave which I learned about through Ancestry. If you're interested in knowing where someone is buried, you can almost certainly find it on this website. Volunteers go out and take pictures of headstones, so if your family's stone has not been photographed, you can request a photo. It's really quite a wonderful resource, and it's free for anyone to use.

Through this website, I've found graves for many relatives all around the United States. Headstones are quite useful to locate because they often give basic facts that you'll need for research.

 This is the page for my second great grandmother which includes links to other family members buried in the same cemetery. So if you wanted to plan a visit to a particular cemetery, you could arrive with a list in hand to find all of your family's plots.

 I knew from research that some members of my maternal grandma's family are buried there, so I drove around looking for the McClelland plot. I headed to what looked like an older part of the cemetery and found it readily.

 

 I located a couple of graves for which I needed better pictures for my family tree.

 Up in the distance you can see the tall pointed stones which belong to the Harvey branch of my family. Until recently I didn't even know I had Harveys in my family. Heck, a year ago I could have walked around this cemetery not recognizing the names on my most of my family's stones.

 

 I didn't stay long, but this quick little stop proved to me that if I ventured out with complete information about which relatives are buried where, I could do a little tour of the few cemeteries around the area and pay my respects as part of my family history project.

It's amazing to me that so many members of my family lived so close to where I live today, yet I'm only just now discovering it. It's almost like they've been hidden in plain sight.

jp