re: Forgotten Graves

My dad went on an ancestry kick for a few years and I visited a few older cemeteries with him. It is interesting seeing how some are still visible after two hundred years and some are falling apart.

I’ll be in a veteran’s cemetery so mine will always be kept up. Not that I’ll know.

My son lives next to a huge cemetery in Cincinnati. They call it the “German cemetery” because so many German families were buried there in the 19th century. I took a walk through it and observed about 20 markers where the person was born in the 1700’s.

And then you walk 30 yards and see a grave of someone who died last year. Fascinating.

My grandparents are buried in a cemetery located is West Jackson, Ms. By the zoo if you know the area. I haven’t been there in years because I value my life and don’t want to get shot! It was a very nice area when they bought the plots. Now it’s a war zone. It’s help me make the decision to be cremated and my ashes spread.

To be fair, the graves were likely there before the interstate highway.

One can always reckon a city's growth patterns by the locations of the cemeteries. We can chronicle the physical growth of New Orleans this way: the location of St. Peter Cemetery is known.
St. Louis #1
St. Louis #2
St. Louis #3/St. Patricks (all of them) Cypress Grove/ Odd Fellow's Rest/Metairie/Greenwood/Holt.
Going out to Gentilly: Mount Olivet/Hebrew's Rest
The current "Potter's Field" is now way out along Chef Highway, as I recall.

Heading uptown:
Lafayette
Valence Street
St. Joseph and Carrollton

East Jefferson only has Garden of Memories and Providence Park. Both of those were once on the edge of "new" neighborhoods.

You see the same pattern on the West Bank. For Algiers there are St. Mary's and St. Bartholomew that were once at the very edge of Algiers, bordering on John McDonogh's plantation. On his land, again once at the edge of civilization is McDonoghville Cemetery (my paternal grandparents, her siblings, are there)

In Gretna, Hook and Ladder was built when Gretna was much smaller (maternal grandparents and most of their siblings and kids, as well as my father) a couple blocks behind St. Joseph. The black Baptist cemetery is a block away and borders the Expressway, which was built over part of it.

Further down La. 23 toward the back edge of Gretna, at one time, is Westlawn. Now it's more-or-less the back of Terrytown.

So on and so on.

Few things more sad than the baby and children section of a graveyard.

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I ran into the same thing while out hunting rabbits one day when I lived in Jackson, MS.

I had run across the Ross Barnet Reservoir to a heavily wooded area around Pelahatchie Bay I wanted to hunt and started walking through the woods only to stumble on an old graveyard that looked to be totally forgotten about. Tall weeds, scrub trees growing by the graves, headstones all covered in algae and damn near impossible to read.

To see all those graves, obviously forgotten to time was a bit eerie----and sad at the same time.

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That's interesting because the graves I found in the woods were on the opposite side of the reservoir off Rice Road near the Sandalwood subdivision. This was early 1990s.

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Calvary in the Civil War

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Cavalry. Calvary is outside of Jerusalem. Not being bitchy, just one of those misused words.

On topic, all of my dad's immediate family is buried in Roselawn, off of North Street. My grandmother's 1st child was a baby girl, who only survived a few days. She is in the "infant" section, a few steps from the rest of the family. Seeing those tiny plots is sobering.

I know the expense of burial is ridiculous, but I still hold with the Christian and biblical faith that we should be buried. If a Jewish person is blown up, they do everything possible to find every remnant of the body, including soaking up the blood, so they can bury the person "whole". Cremation of the Jews in WWII had a far more significant meaning than we realize.

Lastly, someone made a point earlier, regarding how amazing it is that we are here, in the first place. All of us are a billion to one that we even exist. And we oftentimes take that for granted.

Sit Deus vobiscum

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ashes will be stuffed into 4th of July fireworks

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the wife wants to be feed to gators

I have always been interested in seeing where my ancestors are buried. This is partly because I like learning about history and have an interest in genealogy. When I enter a cemetery I make a point of reminding myself that I should act with respect the entire time. I know that some people may not feel the same way, but it's what I regard as proper. I don't view a cemetery as a dumping ground of old bones. Yes, it's where the bodies of deceased have been buried, but I also believe that the spirit of some (possibly all) of the departed who are interred there may dwell. When I visit the tombs of my ancestors I say a prayer thanking God for them and all the good that they did. I also mentally "talk" to soul/spirit of the person and thank them for all the sacrifices they made when they were alive. I tell them that I'm there to see them and that I'm thinking about them. I tell them that I haven't forgotten them.

Yesterday I went to help clean out an abandoned black cemetery. The cemetery has over 300 graves. Slaves and former/freed slaves are buried there. There are veterans of WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam buried there. It's so sad to see graves and the cemetery in such condition. There's a group of us who are whittling away at the brush, thorns, small trees that have consumed it. We will continue working until the entire cemetery is cleaned up. Then we will work to fix the headstones as best we can (level them, reset them, clean them, etc.) It's a big project, but we feel it's the right thing to do.

When I'm in a cemetery I'm reminded of my own mortality and my place in line of a long lineage. I understand that my time alive is limited and that my life and my grave will only be remembered for a relatively small period of time. I'm a Christian and I believe in the afterlife. I hope that once I'm deceased one of my descendants might come to visit my grave occasionally and tell me that I'm remembered. If my spirit/soul is present in the cemetery, it would make me appreciative.

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Have any of you noticed this when visiting a graveyard?

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Yes

Kids today care more about media folks than their own people