Getting the Most from a Grave Marker

Part One:  Visiting the Cemetery

When my grandparents on both sides decided to emigrate from Great Britain to Canada, they left behind much more than their relatives and their homeland.  A few thousand miles migration created a dissection in our family and family history.  For me, genealogy has two geographical and temporal parts:  our local, accessible Canadian family history beginning from 1951/1957, and our less accessible English history pre-dating the Crapper/Dell emigration.  Practically, this has affected the experiential side of genealogy for me.  For instance, while I may be able to see an ancestors’ grave photographically or know their plot and interment number, I have no opportunity to experience visiting their resting place.  The “hands on” approach to family history isn't available for the English period.

A study of my wife’s ancestry, however, has provided that much needed experience.  Her family has centuries old roots in Newfoundland, and in the summer when we vacation there I immerse myself in local genealogy.  I spend hours strolling the cemeteries, discovering and photographing her ancestors’ markers.  It has become both a joy and a passion for me – a privilege that I do not have from my own ancestry.  So, without any more blibber blabber, here are some basics that I have learned from the many hours spent in Newfoundland cemeteries.

1:  When possible, choose the best time and conditions for your cemetery visit.  The natural subdued lighting of an overcast day is more suitable for photographing markers than a clear, sunny day.  Be aware of the position of the sun.  Photographing a marker with the sun behind it can cause a camera to compensate for the sun’s brightness, resulting in a darker picture.

2:  When you arrive at a cemetery, save your current location in your gps.  You will be thankful you did should you choose to visit the hard to find cemeteries at a later date!

3:  Remember to take contextual photographs. 

·         Take 360 degree photographs of the landscape surrounding the cemetery.  Doing so provides a visual, geographical context to the cemetery.  These photographs can also be valuable to other genealogists who may not have opportunity to visit the location.  Remember that the landscape around you is that which your family saw, as they stood around your ancestor’s grave the day he or she was buried.

·         Take contextual pictures of your ancestors’ markers.  What graves lie to the left and right of your ancestor?  What markers lie in the rows succeeding and proceeding that of your relative?  Those who are buried near your ancestor may be important to your family and family research.

4:  Photographing the marker.

·         Choose your perspective.  I prefer to photograph markers “dead on” instead of from the “looking down” perspective.  Keeping the lens parallel to the marker produces a relatively square image, reducing the perspective distortion in which the top of the marker is wider than the bottom.  Photographing a polished stone marker from a slight left or right angle eliminates a reflection image of the photographer in the stone.

·         Choose your picture settings.  To capture the highest quality photographs, I use the largest recording pixel my camera allows (3648 x 2736 or “Large”), with a compression setting of Superfine.  The result is a larger picture, with finer detail that allows greater viewing magnification.

·         Strive for the sharpest picture.  Where possible, use a tripod in conjunction with your camera’s self-timer to eliminate image blurring vibrations.  I have found that using a flash, even on a bright day, yields sharper images than those taken without a flash.

·         Fill the lens with the marker.  Position the bottom of the marker at the bottom edge of the photograph, and the top at the top edge of the photograph.  Filling the lens allows for a more thorough analysis when viewing the marker using greater magnification.

·         Take at least two pictures per marker.  Yes, it is time consuming, but it is better to have a good photograph of your marker than to wish you had a good photograph of your marker!

5:  Take time to photograph every available marker – related and unrelated.

·         These photographs become an historical resource that give back to the genealogical community.  They can be submitted to online genealogy websites, local historical societies, or to individual family historians looking for their ancestor’s grave markers.

·         These photographs preserve history.  Stone is not eternal.  Time and weather destroy markers and erode inscriptions.

·         These photographs aid future genealogical research.  Subsequent research of your ancestry could reveal previously unknown relations, with different surnames, buried in the same cemetery.  In this case, you would already have a photograph on file of that newly discovered ancestor.

Whatever methods you develop or use, don’t forget to enjoy the landscape, enjoy the moment, and don’t forget to connect with your ancestor in your own special way.  Remember, the marker you see could be the very same your ancestors saw.  Just a few feet of soil separates you from your relative.  It is almost as if the grass underneath your feet is still damp with the mourner’s tears.

Bone and Flesh

I don’t want to be an archaeologist anymore.  I want to be a resurrectionist.  I’ve spent the last three years believing that I’ve been digging up bodies of ancestors through the practice of genealogy.  The truth is that I’ve only been digging up lifeless, fleshless “bones”.

My 88 year old grand uncle, a non-genealogist, made me painfully aware of this during our telephone conversation this week.  He told me that his daughter-in-law had been doing genealogy for the Dell family recently, and that she had been telling him the names of our ancestors.  This new and exciting family information was interesting to him, but what he really wanted to know was how his mother and father met.  His father (Frank Charles Dell, my great grandfather), was born in Lambeth, and his mother (Lillie Louisa Jane Davies) was born in Margate.  Margate is about 250 miles east of Lambeth.  How then did Frank and Lillie meet?

I felt a number of things when he asked me this question.  First, I felt embarrassment.  Why had I never considered the question before?  Am I not the family genealogist?  Then I felt curiosity.  Uncle B., that is a damn good question!  So I consulted my research (a marriage certificate) to try and answer it:  Frank married Lillie July 26^th 1919 at the register office in Margate, Kent.  At the time, he was a bachelor of 28 years and was working as a tally clerk.  Lillie was a spinster of 20, and worked as a café waitress.  Their fathers were Frank George Dell, a pianoforte maker, and George James Davies a coach builder.

 

Bones can't tell you that Frank loved to wear a Trilby and Lillie kept mints in the pocket of her apron.

The answer to uncle B.’s question isn’t there, is it?  I’ve spent three years digging up my family like an archaeologist and all I have are some lifeless, fleshless facts – names, dates and places.  I have made a “rookie’ genealogical mistake.  More than this, many of us including myself have made this great and terrible life-mistake:  we never bothered to ask.

Uncle B. had 53 years in which to ask his father how he met his mother.  I have had 42 years in which to ask how my own parents met, and yet I have never bothered.  I just never bothered.

Do you want to get started in genealogy?  Forget the genealogy websites for a time.  Resist the urge to discover who your fourth great grandfather was.  Talk to your parents, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles.  Get to know them, get to know their lives and their stories.  Learn the oral stories handed down to them from their parents and grandparents. 

Genealogy will only give you the bones of your family, but your living relatives will give you the flesh.

Next week (or two):  Tips for interviewing your family.

Dusk

What’s bothering me today, and has been for many days previous, is the knowledge that in time I will be forgotten.  I don’t quite understand it, really.  Shouldn’t I be afraid of the inevitable moment when I pass from life to death?  I don’t mind the setting of the sun, it’s the afterglow that frightens me – those inevitably passing minutes in which the sun’s light increasingly fades and shadows feed and grow fat.  My very last breath won’t just be the end of my life; it will be the gloaming of my life’s imprint.

Yeah.  I know.  I have friends that will immediately say they’ll never forget the impact I’ve had on their lives.  I also have those that will say I’ve been such an ass they’ll never forget me too (I heard those cheers!).  The truth is friends, and not so much friends, you won’t.  Time steals all memories away while you are living, while you are dying, and thereafter while you are lying still.  At best, all my years will become the most succinct summary; a name on a page, text on a piece of paper, or perhaps even just a number on a census.  Unless some nerdy genealogist intervenes, eventually I’ll be completely covered in both dirt and dark.

I will become a Mabel Thornton, who in a mere eighty years after her death – the equivalent of one good lifetime – passed completely from the memories of my family.  Earth and shadow had completely obscured her.  This nerdy genealogist rediscovered her as text on a page, a mere number “1” on the 1911 England census.  For the first time in English history, that particular census recorded how many children were born alive to the present marriage of each family, how many children were still living, and how many had died.  For the Thornton family, they had 6 children born alive, 5 still living, and “1” – little Mabel – who had died previous to the census.  Between the 12^th of March 1906 and the 5^th of December 1907, poor little Mabel had twenty months to take her first steps, say her first words, and suffer her first illness.  Twenty months and Bronchitis began her gloaming.

 

My Princess at 20 months

I found you, lost Mabel.  I know you lived.  I remember you, even if that memory is now only text on a page. A hundred and five years later, someone remembers you.  Who will be my nerdy genealogist?  Who will plunge their hand into the darkness, long after the afterglow, and pull me out of forgotten archives?

If you would like to know the techniques I used to find Mabel Thornton, contact me and I’ll lead you through it if you like.

In The Beginning...

     My fear and hesitation in starting a genealogy and family history blog is that it would hold no interest for those readers outside my family.  Indeed, I myself would never read a blog that solely recounts the lives of those I have no connexion to.  So, with this in mind, I am going to take a different approach.

     My direction and intention, then, for this experience is twofold:  first, I want to use my family story as a "springboard" towards larger subjects - birth, death, and everything in between; second, I'd like this blog to be useful educationally to beginning genealogists.

     Now that is out of the way, next week I'll dig into my worst fear, a fear even greater than that of death - being forgotten.