RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: candyflossyum on Monday 21 May 07 23:42 BST (UK)
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i finally tracked down the burial plots of my gt gt grandparents, and my gt grandmother,the council lady was brilliant,gave me the plot numbers and named a 4 more people that were family members that were buried either together or in seperate graves.
all in all i had the plot numbers of 5 graves,BINGO i thought,
so armed with my flip flops (i didnt think that through very well! ;D) a camera and a big note book off i went to the cemetary.
3 hours and 2 very filthy feet later i found .......NOTHING!!!!
i can only presume that my ancestors didnt bother with a headstone,for anyone,the earliest that any of them died was 1914 and its not a big cemetary.
so infuriating i have done so much work on them that the least they could do would be to make my job just an ounce easier and stick a stone up for me to read lol.
anyway i had to get that off my chest ;D
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Pity the cemetery official didn't have the full records.
I was very lucky - my local office gave me a huge plan of both the local cemeteries I was interested in, that showed all the names and whether the graves had headstones or vases or nothing on them, but I must admit that was abt 20 years ago and it was a novelty to them then to have an enquiry like mine. They kindly let me rummage through all their books and photocopied loads of pages for me, with the names ages and addresses of those buried, names and addresses of the people who had purchased the graves - doubt any office would do that nowadays.
Well at least you had an interesting day out :D
and found a few extra people!
Barbara
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It can be a task in itself finding a grave, even with the plot number. I remember popping up to the graveyard in Penrhys to look for my great-grandaunt's (who's also buried with her husband and one of their sons) grave. Took us a good hour of looking around before we found the right plot. They really need to produce maps, or at the very least mark the plot rows better.
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As I've said on another couple of boards discussing similar topics, my grandfather is buried in a cemetery in Aberdeen. When I contacted them by e-mail a man there very kindly found the grave number and then e-mailed me for my address so that he could send me maps showing the exact location. All this cost me nothing, not even postage for the maps.
Unfortunately, there was no gravestone, but I didn't expect there to be one, as his wife and children lived in Manchester (he was working in Aberdeen when he died in a motorcycle accident in 1926) and times were hard then.
Liz
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I know I've said this before, but I am so grateful to the man from the Parish Council (civil, not ecclesiastical) who told me the date of my grandfather's death, how much his grave cost and who conducted the funeral, then put a little wooden marker on it so that I could go and lay a little posy on there. And they were definitely skint!
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How lovely! :D
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thats a lovely idea,i think i may whisper sweet nothings to the parks and cemetaries lady and see if she could supply a map of the cemetary.
there were only a few graves that had plot numbers and i should have been able to work out where they were buried but sadly not,i found 100-500 markers easily,but mine were 800!!
maybe she gave me the name of the wrong cemetary??
if they are there i would love to put a marker on their graves.
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Some stones have broken or fallen over and been buried over time. Without documentation, we'll never know if some of our ancestors had markers on their graves. I have a few (Canadian) ancestors where I know which cemetery they were buried in (based on newspaper obits) but there are no cemetery or death records and no stones.
Maps of cemeteries are helpful, if they exist.
In my ideal world, cemeteries would be laid out logically, with little signs at the ends of each row.
Even with maps or directions, my husband and I spent a lot of time stumbling around a few cemeteries last summer. We found some of the graves we were looking for but not all of them.
The best and easiest one was when someone had published an index of the stones and included a map that showed the location of each stone with the names on the diagrams. I lack an "internal compass" but even I could have found my ancestors in that particular cemetery.
The cemetery where my father, his father, and his family are buried is the worst that we've encountered so far. The staff is trying to create lists and maps now but proper records have not been kept for the past 200 years. When we were there last year, the only charts they had listed some of the plots by the names of the original purchasers. The plot my father, grandfather and great-grandfather, etc., are in is listed under a name we don't even know. I think they added my family member's names after our visit.
Regards,
Josephine