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A cemetery can yield a goldmine of information about your ancestors, but first you have to find it! The following story about the quest for my great great grandfather's (David) grave will help illustrate my point.
Starting the search for my Great Great Grandfather’s cemetery plotOn a hunch, I opened the telephone boo k and found the address of David’s last living grandchild. I pulled out my Smith Corona typewriter and quickly wrote her a letter asking for any information she remembered about her granddad. I posted the letter and crossed my fingers. Eureka!To my surprise, I received a beautiful, handwritten letter that briefly mentioned that my gg grandfather was buried in "St. John's Anglican" graveyard. Eureka!With this nugget of information, I dashed off to our local library for the next stage of my research. Searching my library for published cemetery property recordsI discovered that volunteers had transcribed and published the information for the graveyard where my gg grandfather was buried. This publication even provided directions on how to get there!Was Granddad buried in a haunted cemetery?I stuffed a camera and a map in my knapsack and drove for two hours into the wilderness.The village where he had lived and died was now a ghost town. I was the only human in sight. “Was this a haunted cemetery?”, I wondered. I scrambled out of the car with my camera overcome with excitement as I dashed into the cemetery. Beyond the cemetery gatesMy gg grandfather's tombstone was surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence overgrown with thick blueberry bushes.In 1918, this is where his wife and children wept as they buried a husband and a father. This was the very location, where two weeks latter, those same children buried their mother struck down by influenza. As I surveyed the tiny graveyard, I learned of the hardships of other pioneers; infants that had died of smallpox and two brothers that had drowned in a nearby river. Find a Grave onlineFind a Grave is a searchable online database that may save you a lot of time. Check it out!
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Find A Grave 5 Quick Ways to Find Your Ancestor's Cemetery Plot Return to Home Page from Cemetery
