I ask because I don’t often visit graves. As a child, my parents took Memorial Day seriously-we would visit the graves, plant flowers (geraniums) tidy up and scrub the tombstones.
Now that my parents are old, we don’t do this anymore.One day, I was driving by the cemetary where my mother’s uncle is buried (he died in 1973). I could not find the grave-as the office was closed. I doubt anyone in the family has been there in over 30 years.
In visiting other ancestral graves, I don’t feel any presence there-I do reflect on the person, and remember him/her. But I don’t feel any sense of obligation.
Do you visit the graves of your ancestors?
Much like you, I used to when younger (1950-1970). Now, not at all.
My ancestors, and aunts, uncles, and a couple of siblings are buried in places I rarely, if ever, get to. So, no, I don’t visit them.
When I was in Ottawa a few years ago, I located my grandfather’s grave. (I got pissed off when I found it, but that’s a different story.) When I passed through Biggar a few months later, I tried to locate his mother’s. So that’s about it.
I found my paternal grandparent’s graves in Cleveland a few years ago. When I was in New Hampshire for my mom’s mom’s funeral, we visited her father’s grave (and yes Grandma was buried next to him).
Oh yes, I visit family graves. I’ll be buried in a small cemetery out in the country, where many people on my mother’s side of the family have been buried for nearly a hundred years. The first burials there were in the late 1870’s. I’ll be next to a great-grandmother, my maternal grandmother’s mother.
I always put flowers at one old grave that nobody tends. It is the resting place of a young woman named Amanda Owens, who died at the age of twenty in 1886. There are words carved below the image of a pair of clasped hands, and they say, “Amanda, you are gone from me but not forgotten” There is nobody else with the same surname in the whole cemetery, so I’m guessing she was a young wife, and that the grieving husband probably re-married and is buried elsewhere.
There are other small cemeteries in the county where relations go, and we usually visit three or four on Memorial Day.
My dad’s grave is in the same graveyard as the family plot that has ancestors going back about 5 generations. So yeah I do, a couple of times a year anyway.
My maternal grandparents are buried together in a graveyard near my parents’ place. Once or twice a year I go to the grave for a few minutes and reflect quietly on their lives. They were pretty extraordinary people.
My grandmother was from the Caribbean, and her sister and my great-grandparents are buried there. On my one adult visit to their island, I sought out my ancestors’s graves. Didn’t stay long as it was in a BAD part of town and within a couple of minutes there were several dubious looking people standing around the edges of the graveyard looking at me with far too much curiosity.
I bike past and stop in now and then. I’m glad that I did stop in when I noticed the crew must have driven a backhoe over one grave marker and damaged it. After a lengthy investigation, the cemetery fessed up and replaced it for no charge. I am the only family member left that will see that sight. My ashes will be spread in my park and the cemetery can wilt for all time.
Not the older ones: My grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents are buried way off in the ass-end of Philadelphia; the last time I was there was for my grandfather’s funeral in the 1990s. Everyone before that was buried goodness-knows-where in Russia and Transylvania, and a lot of the Jewish cemeteries out there were ploughed under. And of course a good many were shoveled into pits or shoved into ovens.
My mother, though, has her ashes in a pond in a lovely park, where she and I used to walk a lot. I visit her on her birthday every year, it’s a nice day off from work, and a visit to the old home town.
My 90 yr old father does. Memorial Day every year. He goes to my mother (his ex-wife), her parents, his brothers and his ancestors. It is really quite sweet that he takes the time to do it.
I think he expects me to do after he is gone. Only problem, Vermont is 1300 miles away.
My family’s gravesites are too far away for us to visit, but we do when we are up there. We do visit my father-in-law’s gravesite. He was buried next to a small pond, and we always take a loaf of bread and feed the geese. He used to put seed in our backyard for the birds and squirrels. We think that’s the best way to remember him.
My family was serious about Decoration Day: every year we would visit every family gravesite and leave flowers. I have several pictures of me as a young girl, dressed in Sunday clothes, standing next to different graves. Sweet and creepy at the same time.
In 1991 I went to make sure that my dad’s headstone was up in the huge military cemetery, and I haven’t been back since. My dad’s not there in any meaningful sense, and I can remember him more clearly when I’m not standing directly under the flight path from MSP. I might drive to the neighboring county to see my grandfather’s and grandmother’s graves for the sake of history but only once.
I do visit small, out-of-the-way cemeteries when we go for drives and read the headstones. I make up stories in my head to go with what I find there. I walked through the beautiful Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis a lot while I was growing up, and I’ve always enjoyed graveyards.
I live too far away now, but my mother will ‘do the graves’ around Memorial Day. One set/side of the family is in the next town, the rest are two hours away. Dad’s side of the family is all together because shortly after a nice Four Generations photo was taken, the youngest (my brother, age 3) died, and the family decided they’d better buy some plots for them and their children. The rest of the family wanted to be there, too. My dad and uncle bought six plots each for themselves, wife and two children each, along with my grandparents and great grandparents. I plan to be buried there when the time comes. Only six of the plots are filled - this began in 1953, so we aren’t exactly dropping like flies.
My mother frets that no one will keep this up once she’s gone (just turned 82). I hope someone in the family who lives nearby (whic is all of them, except me)will do it, and I will go by when I come back to visit.
The cemetery where my maternal grandparents (and a few other relatives) are buried is a short walk from where they used to live, and we visit it whenever we’re in the vicinity (once or twice a year). I’m not sure where my paternal grandparents are buried, though, and I don’t think I’ve ever visited the grave of any ancestors beyond that (most of them, I never really knew, if at all, when they were alive).
Many of my ancestors are buried right here in Portland, and my parents have headstones here, so I’ve visited all of those primarily for the information on the headstones. But I don’t make a habit of it. Riverview is a pretty location, though.
You can contribute gravesite information on this website. You can also search for your ancestors. It’s free and it helps genealogists searching for their ancestors.
Wow, I never knew there was a cemetery at City Hall. 
Dia de los Muertos, my family takes it seriously.
I have a few ancestors buried about an hour from where I currently live, I’d like to do a day trip there sometime.
I can’t bring myself to go to my mom’s grave, though.
It’s been about a year since I visited my parents’ graves. I don’t even know where my grandparents were buried.
It’s just not done in our family.