Many pioneer grave sites in California go back to the mid-1800s. However, I imagine those buried there are essentially forgotten as those they knew eventually move and/or pass away.
I hardly ever see flowers on grave sites going back more than a generation or so.
I was wondering if there are people whose graves are still visited well after the fact.
Graves of public figures and military personnel are probably visited for a long long time.
How about ordinary folks?
Would you bother or have you bothered to pause at a grave of some long-gone ancestor? One you never met?
I find that some tombstones tell interesting stories. While I do visit family headstones from time to time, I save flowers for those belonging to people I actually knew.
I visit my family graveyard anytime I’m in the town it’s in. Some of those graves date back to the late 1800s. I never leave tokens or flowers, but I will take the time to remove trash from the graves, straightened tilted gravestones, and just clean the place up.
I find graveyards to be peaceful places, so I like to visit them. Except for the ones where only a small plaque or cross is allowed to denote a grave. Those places are creepy.
I just stopped by the graves of my maternal grandparents and great-grandparents. I live about 4 hours away, so it’s rare that I’m there. I try to stop by my parents and paternal grandparents and great-grandparents once or twice a year 3 1/2 hours away), but some of my ancestors graves are not as easy to get to. I enjoy genealogy so I think of those ancestors further back than that and say a prayer for them, but don’t go to Forest Home or whatever and actually visit them.
Graveyards in New England tend to be old by U.S. standards and I love them. A lot of New England used to be clear-cut farmland that doesn’t look like the heavily forested area it is today and there are stone walls and grave sites way back in the woods today. It took me three years to locate a 1700’s graveyard on my in-law’s farm in New Hampshire but I was thrilled when I found it. It was small and I could only find four graves and the headstones weren’t intact but it wasn’t hard to tell who they were based on rough documents.
I know where bunches of graves of my ancestors are and have visited many of them. I could take a tour of the East Coast and Southern U.S. and still visit many from the 1800’s and earlier and I plan to do more of that. I think I like graveyards way more than the average person although oddly I never want to be buried myself and I have never let a close family member be either when I had any control over it. I just like the ones for people I never met.
My paternal ancestors have been buried in Maine starting in 1880. I know where each one is and tend them all. My maternal side only goes back to 1900 or so but I take care of them also.
I visit relatives graves; some who died long before I was born. And we have a system within our extended family to care for graves in several areas of the country and see that they get some basic care.
My 14th-great grandparents have the oldest stone (circa 1480) in a church cemetery in Worcestershire, England. One of these days, I’ll go across the pond and visit their grave.
I visited the graves of some distant unknown(to me) relatives in the Hydro Cemetery in Oklahoma back in 1980. Some were Civil War vets. I would visit if I were closer. There’s a mystery about such things that attracts me.
Way out in the country, in Stanton, Tennessee my family is buried. Theirs are the fresh graves, less than 20 years old. Every time I visit I stop by and leave a token of some sort on the grave of a child I never knew, who died over 100 years before I was born. It’s not a historical thing; I just feel drawn to her. The cemetery has some really cool ooold memorials, a lot of those tree trunk stones. Most are laid randomly, unlike the cemeteries in town where you see row upon row of matching stones.
Another yes here. I’ll actively seek old family graves. I recently searched without success for an ancestor according to where government records say a headstone was sent (he was a Civil War veteran). I’ve visited the graves of one ancestor who died in 1850 and another who died in 1878, and I hope within the next five years to go to Virginia to visit the grave of a Revolutionary War ancestor.
The Arkansas town my mother was from had what was called Decoration Day, each July I think it was. Sort of a big party out by the old graveyard outside of town. The idea was to decorate the graves and have family get-togethers. They probably still do it. Back when I was growing up and we went to visit my grandmother regulalry there, we’d often attend Decoration Day, and I saw a lot of old graves from family members, all the way back to pre-Civil War days.
Here maybe, but I was surprised to learn that in Germany, grave sites now are generally “leased” for a certain number of years (10? 15?) and then, if no family member steps up and pays for another lease, another body could be buried at the same spot. I guess land is scarce, and they figure that after a decade or so, people who cared about that grave site are probably dead as well.
There are still older cemeteries with grand tombstones dating back hundreds of years - but newer ones are far different.