Health & Fitness
Finding Your Ancestors in the Cemetery
To the average person cemeteries can represent a place to completely avoid, revere, find solace or perhaps a little of all that depending on the mood. But to a genealogist, a cemetery represents a place where significant family information can be discovered.
For me, even before becoming a genealogist, graveyards were most definitely a place strongly associated with family. Possibly because my mom took my brother and I to cemeteries so much as children to visit relatives who had passed away. Later as a young woman, I gained an additional insight into graveyards after working with a land surveyor laying out new cemetery plots.
But it wasn't until I entered a cemetery with a genealogist's driving passion for knowledge did I come to truly appreciate what the cemetery offers. Initially I focused on taking photos and transcribing the information etched into each ancestor's stone. And for those family members whose graves were not local, I at first settled with viewing and collecting photos I found online. Throughout the first year or so of building my tree, I did not truly understand why I needed to go to the actual site.
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As I got deeper into my research and added new people to our tree, I came to gain a better idea of the true importance of actually visiting your ancestor's grave. Not only did visiting the site where family last gathered to honor the passing of someone’s life offer a type of connection, but I could sometimes find additional clues to their past.
The first time I realized I needed to be more perceptive about picking up on these clues was when I returned from a trip to Tennessee where I photographed many graves of family from my birth father’s side. I was having a hard time finding the parents of my 2x great-grandmother, Laura Belle Lawson Hatmaker. At this time, not enough records were online yet to pinpoint the right family. I happen to have the photo of her grave up (the one you can see posted with this article) when my husband pointed out the grave nearby that said “Mother.” While in the graveyard, I had been so focused on just getting the pictures that I didn’t notice that the proximity of the two headstones and the designation of “Mother” on the grave might have meant this woman was Laura’s mother. As you can see from the headstone, it also had the maiden name of Laura’s mother, Cyntha Stanfield Lawson as an added bonus.
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So because of this along with some other things I’ve learned along the way, I came up with the following tips for researching family history in the cemetery: