dimitrig said:
…Maybe it's a morbid hobby, but I do this from time to time and I have visited other cemeteries
…some were good people and some probably the worst of the worst and yet there they all were together.
Great post.
Have you ever spent time on findagrave?
Here's Marilyn's page.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/725/marilyn-monroeI have had the genealogy bug for nearly 2 decades now. Ancestry.com at first. Then familysearch.org
Sometimes I use wikitree.
But findagrave is fantastic and I've put most of my ancestors on there and linked them up. There can be a rush to be the person who manages a page, but most who post there are simply hobbyists who like walking graves and posting as many as possible, thus, they will transfer a page to a relative who asks. That's happened for me dozens of times. I can then better present their page.
I like findagrave better than pure genealogical trees (digital or paper) because it references a place that actually exists today. And those places are special - as you say, they represent where the person's remains still are, where the family stood and mourned.
I was driving across the USA about 10 years ago. I knew my maternal grandmother was buried in Topeka (grandpa had told me) but I didn't know which cemetery.
The day before getting to KS I looked on a lark, and someone had recently added her on findagrave. She hadn't been there when I looked a year or two before. I was thrilled. But when I got there it was about 7pm on a Sunday. Nobody was there and I had about 2 hours of daylight left.
I started walking the rows. After about 40 minutes, I found her. After I calmed down my excitement, I then began to imagine my grandfather, his 1 and 3 yr old daughters, her family all mourning the loss of this young woman (seizure). Same place, nothing changed, just time.
So, I like graveyards, too. I think it's healthy to consider death. Most people ignore it.
I don't visit my ancestors regularly - after the first visit, it becomes sad, loses that magic, hallowed feeling. I do try to visit everyone imaginable at least once! Great great aunts, uncles… doesn't matter, so long as my people were there. I can picture them all, where they stood and cried and said their goodbyes, like watching a movie in my head, in front of where I stand.
But I am on their findagrave pages all the time. In this way, I'm very in touch with my lineage story of how my life came to be - and where it's going. It allows me to think about what I want to do, see, leave behind - mostly, leave behind.
Amen, dimitrig.
(Is that, Dimitri G? Are you of Russian ancestry?)
