Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Mystery at the graveyard

I enjoy going to graves.  I don't even need to know the people buried there.  My favorite one was in Italy when I was 16.  I explored that cemetery every morning after my run/hike.  That was the first place that I ever saw photos on the headstone.  I wasn't sure how I felt about that.  Part of me thought-wow that is a great idea.  The other part of me thought-I am not sure I want to know who is buried here.  Either way I was quite fascinated by the whole concept.  I even believed that it was a Italian thing because I had never heard of such a thing here in the US.  I have since found them in the US so it isn't such a novelty any more.
Do you want to be in a cemetery?  Do you want to be cremated and still have a burial plot?  For most of my life I have been terrified of being cremated.  Burning to death is my greatest fear so clearly being cremated wasn't going to work for me.  It really doesn't matter that I would not be living at the time!
Do you visit the graves of your beloved family that have passed on?
Is it important to you to have a place to go to remember your loved ones?
Since I love them, I really want to be buried in a lovely quiet spot.  Realistically, I don't have anyone that is going to be gung ho about coming to visit my grave.  One of my children won't even go with me now.  Too creepy she says and the other just doesn't share my fascination.  So, really who is going to come and see me.
I know that my 96 year old grandmother would go and visit her husband's grave often but now she is unable to drive and hasn't been for years.
Today I wanted to go and get pictures of grandpa's headstone but I couldn't find it.  I knew where it should have been.  Even thought I knew what it would look like.  Sorteberg is a pretty long and uncommon name.  Can't exactly miss it when you are looking for it.  Alas, I was not able to find it.  So I started looking for the other family names that I knew were supposed to be there.  Couldn't find them either.
Switched gears and thought maybe there would be some plot map somewhere.  No luck.  The Anoka County Historical Society is just down the road so I went there to see if there was any such thing.  No luck.
Internet search turned up no one responsible for the cemetery.  How do I go about finding a plot map?  Do I have to go from grave to grave and make one myself.  Forest Hill Cemetery isn't small.  It seems to me that there should be someone who has this knowledge!  I left pretty frustrated.  I know I have burial plots of some of my ancestors but now I have to figure all that out by going into Ancestry.com and looking at each individual person that has died and making a list of who is buried where.  I guess I will be busy for a while.
Photo by Richard Rhode

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