We have a great little cemetery in my neighborhood. Catholic, been in use since the late 1800s and still active (I mean burials still take place there: you don’t want an “active” graveyard!). I stroll through it on the way to and from the grocery store, and read the gravstones. “Ohhh, died in 1917: war?” “Poor thing, only five years old.” “Wow, born in the 1820s!”
Is it an Italian-Catholic tradition to have photos on the stones, under thick glass? I’d never do that: all it takes is one wise-ass with a Magic Marker to turn you into Groucho for posterity. But it makes cemetery-strolling more interesting. There’s one girl, who died in 1934 in her early twenties, who’s gorgeous (I mean, her photo, I haven’t dug her up to check). She has perfect showgirl makeup, marcelled hair, a big picture hat: looks like she just stepped out of a Busby Berkeley chorus line! Her parents, buried nearby, are hard-faced peasants; my theory is they killed her to keep her from going into the Follies.
There’s a cemetery directly across the street from my house. It’s rather pretty, with big old trees everywhere and a nice white Celtic cross that was just replaced a couple of years ago. The cemetery is really old, and the headstones are so abraded that they’re difficult to read, but there are some beautiful monuments. There’s one that has a huge engraved stone slab on stilts, sort of like a table, and right next to it is an obelisk (about 7 feet tall) with an angel on top. The slab and the obelisk are both inside a wrought iron fence. I’ve never really looked around, but this thread may just inspire me to do so.
My local cemetary is a real gem. We have graves dating back to the late 1700s, and we had a lot of rich folks in this town, so there are a lot of morbid, ornate monuments. My favorite has this poem engraved on the headstone:
“Death is a debt
Which is always due
I’ve paid mine
And so must you.”
Eve I’m glad to know you haven’t taken to digging up the dearly departed to check on their current condition, which I believe we can pretty much guess as still dead.
The old part of the city cemetary in my hometown has some really great tombstones. I’ve always liked walking through there. It has wide paths and cool old oak trees plus all those wonderful tombstones. The newer part has no trees, very narrow paths and really uninteresting tombstones. They just don’t make graveyards like they used to, do they?
There are many small, very old cemeteries around St. Mary’s county. Any time I drive past one, I think I should plan to stop and check them out. Some day I will. I expect some graves may go back to the 17th century.
Now, up the street from where I grew up, there was a pet cemetery, and I imagine it’s still there. Among the dogs and cats, are a family of mice, some snakes, some fish, and probably some rodentia. Next time I’m around there, I need to go back…
I love looking through cemetaries too. The one closest to me is an area that was settled by Tongan and Samoan immigrants - they like the photo thing too. My favourite has a picture of a guy who obviously had an alter ego who was female. They also like to drape their graves in fake flower leis - you can imagine what the cemetary looks like after a storm. I remember looking through a cemetary in California and being fascinated by one gravestone that just read: ‘Murdered’ - and the guys name, nothing else! I also loved the cemetaries in Russia - they all seem so gothic. You can really imagine making a horror flick in them -especially the one Tchaikovsky is buried in.
When I lived in Chicago, I lived acros the street from Graceland Cemetery:
Among the impressive robber baron graves was an artifical lake, with several tiny islands; and on each island was a mausoleum for each of the robber baron’s children.
But that’s not weird. Weird was when I was a hospice worker and one family whose toddler had died didn’t want the showing in a casket. They wanted him sitting in his high chair.
While researching our family history, my father took me to a graveyard where Denver, TX used to stand. The graveyard had been in use for over a hundred years, but there were few new graves. It was obvious that only those last few folk from the town were being buried there.
There were some beautiful gravestones. I was interested by the ones that were square columns, with a family member on each side of the column, so Father, Mother, Son, and Spinster Daughter were laid out like compass points.
There were a lot of babies. One of the largest tombstones was for a baby girl who died at around eighteen months old. It really made me reconsider my uber-feminist we’ve-been-so-oppressed-for-centuries take on gender and culture. Those parents loved that little girl and grieved for her so much, they laid out what must have been a hefty fortune for the marble headstone that stood over her grave.
My father and I both noticed that there were very few children that died between the ages of three and thirteen. Then, the boys started dying again - farm accidents or teenage boy stunts, we figured. My father had a great uncle who’d died at the age of fourteen. The boy had pulled his horse from a gallop into a standing stop, and the horse fell over, crushing him. The girls started showing up again in their late teens, early twenties - chldbirth, perhaps. From there, it seemed you were fairly safe until your forties or later.
It was strange to stand in the hot, humid Texas sun, listening to the cicadas and considering the lives of the people buried there, but I’ve never forgotten it.
I’d say it’s more of a general Mediterranean thing. In the old city cemetery where my maternal grandfather, great uncle, and aunt are buried, there are a lot of those photos – Italian, certainly, but there’s also a large contingents of Greek and Portuguese, with some what-used-to-be Yugoslavian (I think) thrown in.
In the “old country” photos on gravestones were part of the memorial, akin to having photos of the deceased at the wake nowadays. My great uncle’s photo is on the family headstone. As a kid I’d chuckle at his huge walrus mustache
There’s a photo of a handsome young man buried two plots over from Grandpa &co. He died in the early '50s. We used to run into his relatives every so often on Memorial Day. He was their only child. I wish I could remember what he had died of.
The area where my dad is buried is bordered on three sides by mid 1800s-early 1920s section. I love wandering through there gazing at the huge granite monuments and the statues, wondering about their lives and how they died. There are a lot of children there, some from the 1918 influenza epidemic, but others…what happened? Scarlet fever? TB? Pneumonia?
Oh, I meant to add that my great uncle’s photo, as well as the photo of the handsome young man, have yet to be defaced. They both have minor cracks, but that’s it.
The photos in my local graveyard have yet, kina hora, to be defaced either, though many are scratched and covered by moss. I love the photos as much as the inscriptions: it gives you a little window into their life and times. Most of them are stiffly-posed, looked 20 years older than their age at death; but a few, like the Follies girl, are breath-taking.
Among all the Italians, Poles and a few Germans, is one lone Scotsman, who died in the 1890s. I wonder who the heck he was, and how he found himself in New Jersey, to die young and wind up with a bunch of Italian Catholics?
In the town I grew up in, there’s one cemetary that was (the whole town’s tripled in size since I left) a bit off the beaten path. I don’t remember if there were any really old graves there or not, because there was this one gravestone that just dominated the place (the town was a small farming community for most of it’s existance, and the folks who lived there generally didn’t have much money). It was the size of a VW Beetle upended. There was this enormous square base and out of the top of it were two massive hands, holding an even larger rough hewn sphere. On the block was carved, “He’s got the whole world in His hands.” Rather bizarre.
Eve, photos on your grave are passe. Now you can have a small LCD monitor (solar powered, BTW) mounted on your gravestone which will show an assortment of photos (and possibly video) of the deceased. Kind of strikes me as being tacky.
And your OP, reminded me of a joke Dave Allen used to tell. An Irishman was sitting in a bar when a terrible storm came up. The wind was howling, lightning flashing, and the rain was pouring down something fierce. “Oh,” thought the Irishman. “'Tis a night for the ghosts and goblins and banshees to be out! I best take the shortcut through the graveyard home tonight.” (See, the Irish know that on a night like that, the graveyard’s the safest place to be, since all the ghosts and the like will be elsewhere scaring up mischief.) So he finishes his drink, pays his tab, and walks home. While he’s walking through the graveyard, he falls into a grave that had been dug for a funeral. He gets up, tries to climb out, makes it almost all the way to the top, and then slides back down. He tries a few more times, and then decides that the only thing to do is wait until morning for when the caretaker shows up. He settles down in one corner of the grave and goes to sleep. About an hour later, he’s woken when another fellow coming home through the graveyard falls in. He watches the fellow try to climb up the side of the grave, only to slide back down again. The Irishman looks at him and says, “You’ll never get out.” He did.
What a grand old place. Initially the highest of highest class, with row after row of centuries-gone Congressmen (grand despite them), it fell into disrepute and disrepair. A previous manager had embezzled all the funds and sunk to stealing and selling brass off the graves. When I first started walking my dog there, it was heavily overgrown with grass and wild weeds. In summer there would be a millionwild carrots in the southeast corner. I didn’t know what they were, but their beautiful white ovals tilted at all directions to one another made me invent the name “galaxy flowers” for them. I have been sorry since to learn their real name. At least I can call them Queen Anne’s Lace if I want to.
Wonderful graves in Congressional Cemetery. Souza, with a hedge around him. One recent burial of a lady apparently famous as a historian and schoolteacher; around the base of her stele, they engraved, “Dates born and died – Look it up!!!” Among the early 19th century congressmen’s monuments there is one very respectful cenotaph to a Choctaw Indian chieftain. J. Edgar Hoover is buried there, but there’s a little fence around his grave so you can’t get your dog to pee on him. Down the hill three graves is his lifelong, uh, companion. Down three graves from that is the wonderful stone that says “The army gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” It now has a little bronze marker of tribute for his military service from Prez George Bush senior – nice gesture, GB. Once a year somebody would leave a single long-stemmed rose and an upturned crystal wineglass by his grave.
I wasn’t being disrespectful walking my dog among mortal remains. The Congressional Cemetery was being restored slowly to its lost condition through the dogwalkers. We each paid a hundred bucks a year (later more) and the embezzled monies were slowly reaccumulated. (They caught the bastard easily, but no matter what the courts said he had to do to make restitution, he was broke. Those lost brasses never came back, either.) We were almost the only users of the cemetery - its scant four acres were too small for the sort of serious joggers one finds in DC, and there was nearly no one buried there any more. We regularly filled the metal-barrel trash cans with poop bags, cleaned up litter too, and never would have tolerated unpicked up poop. Much chatting over the heads of joyous dogs free to sniff and run. Because of our dues the cemetery was gradually restored to clean and well cared for and mowed.
We have a rather unremarkable graveyard on the corner just about a mile up the street. It’s been there quite a while, and they most recently installed a military memorial for the town’s fallen heroes. There is also a very pretty cemetery not too far from here where my husband won a plot. So there’s one expense I won’t be saddled with!
I’ve mentioned before that my in-laws are cemetery groupies. They chat it up with the family of their dead son’s “death neighbor.” They have lunch there. The runners in the family will run nine miles to the gravesite, sit around and catch their breath, and then run home. They purchased a marble bench (complete with compartments to put ashes, should someone actually be granted their wish to be cremated) and an eternal flame. They plan to dig him up and move him to Arizona when they move.
My other SIL goes out drinking with the woman who helped them with the burial arrangements.
They have weekly treks to the graves, being sure to visit everyone, cleaning debris off the gravesites, planting flowers, laying evergreen blankets on each site “to keep them warm in the winter”, etc. If things appear unkempt, they march into the office and demand a maintenance crew get out there and do their job.
My husband and I never go, except for the initial interment. But you can bet that if anyone in the family joins the ranks of the undead, we’re there, baby!
My office isn’t far from Bunhill Fields, the final resting place for people including William Blake, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. It’s not possible to walk among the graves themselves, which are fenced off, but I often stroll through when I’m taking a break from work. Here’s the Wikipedia link.
There’s a teeny little cemetary near here that’s practically in someone’s yard. It consists of about two graves and a mini-vault. It’s the Curtiss-Very Cemetary, and it’s either in Peabody or Lynn. Nothing interesting that I can recall on any of the stones. It’s the size and location that always make me look for it. Other cemetaries nearby – Salem, Cobb’s Hill – may have more historic persons in them (witches! Ben Franklin’s Parents! Paul Revere! Mother Goose(or so they say)!), but this is the one we always try to catch a glimpse of.
Murfreesboro’s Greenland Cemetary (located right next door to where we’ve always kept the hospital, very practical) has a mass grave. Confederate Soldiers, who fought in the Battle of Stones River, & lost, are buried in a large, single grave. Union soldiers got (mostly) individual burials over at the National Battlefield & Military Cemetary site.
We have a separate burial site for our city’s Founder & Revolutionary War Hero, Colonel Rutherford. Jammed between a hardware store & a lumber yard. The people who run this town have no respect for anything.
Montgomery’s Oakwood Cemetery, Oakwood Cemetery Annex and Saint Margaret’s Cemetery is very interesting. Originally the cemeteries were separate on three different hills but over the years they just blended together. Yes, Hank Williams is buried there, but there’s also a RAF section for British WWII pilots who died here and a small French section for their WWI pilot deaths. Of course there’s the rows on rows of confederate grave, mostly unknowns. There are also several mass graves for the yellow fever epidemics of the 19th century.
Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis has a mass grave of over 20,000 yellow fever victims. Yowza. And the grave seemed really small. It’s hard to imagine that many people dying during one summer in one town.
