Growing up my mom, sister, Aunts, Grandma and I would make
the rounds to the many cemeteries in southeast Iowa visiting putting flowers on
graves for memorial Weekend. As a child I didn’t realize what a gift they were giving me by taking me
to visit all these graves. It wasn’t until 2014 when I was much older that I
took an interest and wanted to document the names, take photographs, and learn
the stories of who these people were.
Now each year we load up the car with Flowers, gardening tools,
my genealogy books, and camera. Over the years as I’ve done more research and find new cousins, aunts, uncles and
direct descendants and visit new cemeteries each year. There’s nothing I love
more than walking a cemetery searching for a new stone and the satisfaction
when you find it!
In 2020 I was supposed to go to Europe the first week in
June but with the world shut down my mom and I took that week I was supposed to
be gone and went to 42 cemeteries throughout southern Iowa and Northwest
Missouri. We had a wonderful time.
My favorite thing about visiting cemeteries is that many of
them are located in beautiful spots up on a hill, surrounded by trees, in an
old church yard, or out in a cow pasture. When you go at Memorial Weekend they
are filled with peonies, irises, and spiria and everything is green and
beautiful.
Even though I’ve been to many of these cemeteries many times
I still like to go every year, spend time at the graves, remember the people,
and pass along their stories so that they don’t get forgotten. I take extra
care with the graves of folks who never had children or have no descendants to visit
them.
There is this quote I found on Pinterest I’m not sure of the
Author but it sums up Cemeteries to a T.
This is a Cemetery…
Lives are
commemorated, deaths are recorded, families are reunited, memories are made tangible,
and love in undisguised. This is a Cemetery.
Communities accord
respect, families bestow reverence, historians seek information and our
heritage is thereby enriched.
Testimonies of
devotion, pride and remembrance are cast in bronze to pay warm tribute to
accomplishments and to the life, not the death, of a loved one. The cemetery is
homeland for memorials that are sustaining source of comfort to the living.
A cemetery is a
history of people, a perpetual record of yesterday and a sanctuary of peace and
quiet today. A cemetery exists because every life is worth loving and remembering,
always.
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