Making a ghostbusting genealogical visit to a Cemetery? Here is a bit of ancedotal cemetery visitations and a short list for planning, preparing and visiting your favorite ghosts.
By David Edwin Bell
My first efforts in gathering information for genealogical research for my family spilled over from the Internet to the nether-sphere…Cemeteries. In reality one of the activities of most of the family vacations was to visit old cemeteries. Don’t as me why. I firmly believe now that this was the engendering of my interest in history and genealogy at an early age. I recall a visit to several cemeteries in Boston. We were doing a normal tour via a map and there was a stair to a higher level of the old town—at the top was an old cemterery. The names, inscriptions and epitaphs I found to be interesting even at the early age of perhaps 12 years.
I count my first “genealogical visit” to a family cemetery as an event in 1969. This was the era of time when I took over driving for the family—I had the driver’s license after all. My father “acquiesced” and the family planned a vacation to visit the eastern seaboard, namely Washington, D.C. and New York. If you hadn’t guessed it by now—Dad said he would not drive in places such as New York and had no use for going to a big city back east. It was with some degree of reluctance that we even considered a family vacation north of the Mason-Dixon Line and East of the Mississippi River. I believe this is because he felt we were Westerners—not western, not cowboy, not hillbilly – but among the “new Intellectuals of the true American west. I now know that there are false stories told in families and passed down from one generation to the next. I guess this will be the fable of my Father’s creation.
We were traveling the first day on I-70, St. Louis to
Washington, D.C. but would stop for the night. I do not know if my mother
planned it but as we approached Wheeling, West Virginia to stop for the
night—Mom suddenly said, my father was born and raised near here.
My parents rented a motel room for a short stay but Dad suggest Mom plan a
morning drive through the country so we could tour the area of Silver Hill and
West in Wetzel County, West Virginia. He said, “Maybe you can find some kin
still living in the area.” This turned into a phone call back to Missouri and
Mom obtained the phone number of cousins and called them that same night. The
result was an introduction to cousins galore and tours of various and assundry
Calvert family locales including the homestead of Albert Gallatin Calvert b 1830
d 1908, former State Representative for the Proctor District, Wetzel County West
Virginia and a delegate to the West Virginia Constitutional Convention.
My first photos related to Genealogy show the old homestead and graveyard. Of course, I didn’t know this photo, taken nearly 40 years ago would become part of my collection of Genealogical related photographas. Among family posessions are many more that I have yet to dig out but one of these days I will get organized and go through all the photos which have been stashed away—from my grandfather’s trunk which had photos taken before 1900, to photos collected since I began my Genealogy adventure and all points in between.
Why such interest? I don’t know why—maybe it started on this 1968 trip “back east” or perhaps it was reading poetry, and I was enamored with the dark tomes of various poets but some were lighter in nature as well, such as the following excerpt form Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?
I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe,
Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Surely there are more interesting places to visit than a cemetery aren’t there? Sometimes I think not—and such visits are very useful for genealogical research, providing dates, spellings of names, locales and a more personal collection of material and information about our ancestors. Keep in mind that tramping through a cemetery requires appropriate clothing consideration dependent upon the season and location. Protective clothing is sometimes necessary for those out back environments and watch out for those briar thorns. Not only was the site difficult to find as nature had reclaimed the area which was
originally an open site—but Briars acted as a natural defense against intrusion, as if I were somehow invading the privacy of Ghosts.
Tramping into the location on a hot late July day, I was wearing appropriate shoes and had along my equipment BUT: I was wearing shorts and had no way to get into where the stones were located without having my legs look as if someone had taken a cat o’ nine-tails to them. Be careful also where you tread…some of these old cemeteries have unseen pitfalls and slogging through them can be dangerous. I finally got into the copse of thorns and took some photo—you will see those later.
For me, Cemetery visits are most ethereal—meditative to a great extent and for those ancient remote grown over locations—a chance to delve into the history of our families and our disapearring “Republic”.
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