Cemetery visitors

Anyone out there share my interest in visiting cemeteries? I almost imagine it as if I am walking into a crowd of different people to meet. Only obviously they are just headstones I am looking at, I find some sort of peace there. My family has done a lot of geneology so I used to walk cemeteries with them all the time.

I love them, I love reading the names of the people who used to walk this earth and wonder at their lives, wonder what they died of and was they loved or hated, or work out how long they have been dead and how old they was when they died.

I find it facinating and can do it for hours and hours, I have moved to a new area in a remote place with cemetarys miles from any where little tiny ones and reading them is so calming.

We have one that on the tomb stone it says it is never to be opened and it took a lot of digging around to find out the occupant died of a nasty contagous illness ! It was the whole family .

So you are not alone !

Good! Some people look at it as morbid. I like every bit of it.

I go to them all the time. always have liked that. now I am a paranormal investigator so I frequent them more now.

I love to visit older cemeteries.

Some of the sayings (that can still be read) blow me away, and how they would place the age (including days lived).

I have an extreme reverence there and feel that I'm learning/tapping something, but not quite sure what it is.

One saying on one was particular negative about the life the person lived and warned the reader about not going to the same place he was. It was eerie how it was stated.

KD

You could check with your local genealogy societies (state, county, city) and see if there are any cemeteries that need listings done: http://www.findagrave.com/

I had one down the street from where I use to live in an old nineteenth century mill town and that was fun to walk that way and see if I could find the oldest grave, etc.

Oh, yeah, Perna.

We have several around here and I've visited some of them.

When hubby and I went to Indiana for a weekend getaway, we passed several older ones, but then we also saw two family cemeteries on private property...amazing.

KD

ugh i am terrified of cemeterys i didnt even want to go when my grandma died...

also, i hate driving by them. they just really creep me out..

Love em.

Theres some neat old private plots from WAY WAY back near our summer property. If I remember correctly some are from the 1700s.

i think i just dont like them because they remind me that people die and i dont want to die and i dont want the people i love to die.

I love findagrave.com I have been a member for around 7 years or so.

I really like old cemetaries - it's neat when you find especially old gravestones, but it's kind of sad too because you see so many kids gravestones who died as babies or small children. Makes me greatful for modern medicine.

I also like military cemetaries - I visited one in Gallipolli that had 2 plots side by side, one Turkish, one Britsh. They showed the rank and the ages as well as the names of the people buried there and it was really sad because there were so many 16 and 17 year olds.

--splitimage

I like to see some of the sky-scraper like headstones. Those amaze me. I would love to have one like that when i die, they would sure grab your attention!

Cemetaries give me ... the creeps
Lily

My uncle used to have lunch in a cemetery everyday for 30 years, he'd just sit there and read his paperbacks for an hour or two. I guess there aren't so creepy during the day.

They used to scare me, but I worked as a gravedigger for a bit, so I got very used to them

I have a slightly different take on this. From the time I was a child I would go up and visit the graves of my grandparents and chat a while. For the most part my family is all buried together, oddly both side paternal and maternial, in one general place. It's a beautiful old cemetary (new one just down the hill).

When my father died, he was buried right next to his mother. We set up a concrete bench. We replaced the old headstones (actually just moved them to the foot of the graves) and the new one has on the back a poem that my father wrote to my mother.

Each spring we put photos in waterproof frames of my father on the grave, along with his shadow boxes, and boxes and planters of flowers.

So here's where it gets different for me now, when I go to his grave site and find strangers sitting on the bench I find it an invasion of our privacy. He knew many people from all over the country. Most of the time, when I approach they'll say "I knew your dad, we met.... he did .... for us, thank you, I'm sorry for your loss." That's ok, but when they're strangers, I just feel violated somehow. This is a small town everyone knows everyone, I concider these people family, it's just strangers that bother me.

Since my hubbies father passed away in 97 or so, I obviously never met him so on one of my days off i went and found his gravestone, placed a rose on his stone and introduced myself.

I used to live across from a cemetary.
At midnight, I would climb the fence and sit beside William Blake's grave and think about things...It was so peaceful.