Cemeteries

I have always liked cemeteries. Some of my fondest childhood memories revolve around family visits to the Wheelwright family plot in the Brigham City, Utah cemetery. Every trip to Bear Lake included a stop there, especially on Memorial Day, when Dad would get up early in the morning to cut bunches of flowers from the snowball tree and the iris patch. They would ride in glass canning jars alongside us kids in the back of the company truck, to be placed alongside the large block of granite engraved with WHEELWRIGHT in big capital letters. Mom and Dad taught us respect for the dead on those visits, cautioning us to walk between the graves, not over the tops of them. Yet they allowed us to climb on the big stone and they also told us stories.
Walking from one grave to the other, tracing the dates with childish fingers, I would listen to the stories of my ancestors--Dad's mother, Valborg, who came to Brigham City from Denmark as a young girl, and his older brother, Russell, who died as an infant not far from where he was buried. Then we always had to go look at Lorenzo Snow's grave nearby, marked by a large white obelisk, engraved with not only his name, but those of his multiple wives as well. "We'll be in good company," Dad would say, "in the resurrection."
Well, I wasn't too interested in resurrection when I was ten years old, but I did love to hear the stories of my ancestors and imagine the stories of the rest of the people buried there. I would walk up and down the rows of stones, reading names and dates, matching parents with children, aunts and uncles, and wonder who these people had been in life.
In my efforts to research other family members, I have wandered through many cemeteries besides the one in Brigham City--Ogden (more Wheelwrights), Salt Lake (the Coulams), Provo and Manti (the Billings family), Nephi (the Ockeys) and St. George and Bear Lake (the Greenhalgh family). There is a reverence in cemeteries, a peace, that is different from other settings. When I stand at a grave and read the names on the stones, I try to picture each burial. What were the people thinking? What were they feeling? How were they dressed? What was the weather like?
Last summer I visited the cemeteries that sit up on the hill overlooking Bear Lake. I was looking for the grave of Florence Delores Billings, daughter of Margaret Alice Greenhalgh and William Wallace Billings. She was my grandmother's sister, who died at the age of ten while the family was temporarily living in Paris, Idaho. Idaho cemetery records show that she was buried in the Paris cemetery, but there is no location noted for the grave and there is no stone. I didn't find the grave, but I'm certain she was buried there on what must have been a cold February day in 1899. Her mother was beside herself in grief and wanted the body taken to Provo to be buried alongside other family members, but it wasn't possible that time of year. So they buried her there on that hill in an unmarked grave, surrounded by graves of people she never knew.
A different vision came to mind when I visited the Billings family graves in the Provo cemetery. Here are buried Titus and Diantha Morley Billings, who lived to be old and had a large family. I imagine the scene of Diantha's burial to be similar to that of the burial of my own mother, adults standing around talking, children running between the graves in the late spring sunshine (Diantha died in May) and everyone gathering together to pray and place flowers on the casket before it's lowered into the ground. There was some sadness, yes, but unlike the scene of young Florence's burial, there was gladness too, and celebration of a life well-lived and going on in the lives of the very family that was there.
Cemeteries can provide a wealth of information for family historians too. Many cemeteries have names, dates and burial locations listed in online databases, so you don't even have to go to the cemetery in person to get much of the information, but there are things to learn beyond the dates when you do visit grave sites. It's interesting to note the style of a gravestone, the other things written on it and the placement of family members in proximity to each other. I think of a cemetery as a great repository of stories. In the next few weeks I will visit cemeteries in Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and Nebraska. Most of these cemeteries have no markers. Indeed, the cemeteries themselves may be hard to find. But just being in the place where family gathered is meaningful and, I hope, will give me a better sense of the events that shaped their lives and thus my own.
If anyone else has an interesting experience about a cemetery visit, I'd love to hear your stories too.