A Memorial Day shout-out to the cemetery keepers!
On this Memorial Day, I’d like to give a shout out to the keepers of all the cemeteries of the world.
My genealogical research had stalled. I was ready to give up on one line of inquiry altogether. Then I discovered the website FindAGrave.com and had a dozen Eureka moments within a few minutes of searching.
After my many years of failed research for death certificates, I had hoped FindAGrave would finally point me to the resting place of my great-grandfather.
Indeed it did! It showed me a headstone with the proper name, and it was in a cemetery which made sense—Lakewood Cemetery in south Minneapolis, near the neighborhood his family had lived. Earlier research had confirmed that my Great Aunt Pearl—his daughter—was buried in this same cemetery, so it seemed logical Great-Grandpa would be there.
But I remained wary of some FindAGrave information. I knew that it had to be verified, cross-checked, double-checked, and, for me, seen with my own eyes. So, that’s what I did.
When I finally got to visit the cemetery in Minneapolis, I headed to the office to ask for a map and was delighted to find an entire, efficient staff working there. One young woman was very helpful, pointing out exactly where my great-grandfather would be in the expansive place, and where I would find my great-aunt, his daughter Pearl. They were not near each other by any means, but that didn’t bother me; they would have died half-a century apart.
Following the instructions of the cemetery employee, I tracked down Thomas Thompson’s gravesite. As we approached, I knew something was not right. Giant monuments! Vaults! Archways! Expensive, ornately carved granite greeted us as we approached the section for his grave. He was surrounded by some of Minneapolis’s well-known names—Pillsbury, Washburn, Radisson.
Um, no. My great-grandfather had been a carpenter. Or a railroad worker. Or a cement fixer. Or a “layabout,” as the British would say. He was most decidedly not a Pillsbury (As in the flour people who built Minneapolis. No.) This was NOT my great-grandfather’s gravesite. I could feel it in my bones.
I returned to the office to confirm I had, in fact, looked in the right place; that there were no other Thomas Thompson’s on the premises. There weren’t.
Then I happened to mention to that same employee that I had confusing information about my great-grandmother’s ashes being scattered here, but buried in Illinois. The worker was nonplussed. “Oh, quite often families will split ashes and put them in two different locations.”
What??!! This had never occurred to me. It probably should have occurred to me, but it hadn’t.
If she had been scattered at this cemetery—Lakewood—the worker explained, she was actually scattered in Jo Pond, a tiny thing that served as a focal point to one section of the cemetery, one more modest in stature and tucked quite far away. It’s where ash scatterings were allowed back then. She pointed to the lake on the map. I had to go see it.
The lake was lovely, and unremarkable for Minnesota. Nevertheless, tears sprung to my eyes as I realized one quest of mine was over: My great-grandmother, whose name and DNA I share, was somehow out there as part of Jo Pond’s ecosystem. The cemetery had provided a lovely shaded bench from which I could contemplate that fact.
Map in hand, I now decide to find Great Aunt Pearl’s grave. She was daughter to that woman scattered in the lake, my great-grandmother Christina. Sitting on the bench, finding Pearl’s site on the map, I realize I have been sitting with my back to Pearl’s grave, maybe 40 yards from the shore. In her death, Pearl would have had a “view” of her mother’s resting place, the lake.
Seeing became believing just then. I had found my great-grandmother, at last.
