Final Edition: In praise of the newspaper obituary.
As a lover of all things cemetery-ish (and not a lover of death I should note) I must say that I love obituaries, as well. A well-written obituary is an under-appreciated literary form. Really. As a last farewell, they leave us with an image of the person who has died, the last image anyone will see of them.
(I want to know how someone becomes a professional dilettante, though...
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As an aside, I just realized that I should mention my cemetery fascination. I keep thinking that this is an earlier website where I made all this clear, and then I realize that people probably aren't aware of my hobby.
My brother died almost 25 years ago now, and is buried in a cemetery close to where I live. I hadn't given the cemetery any thought prior to this even though many relatives and friends are also buried there. When my brother died I started going by now and again to make sure the gravesite was clean, etc.. During my visits I started noticing names I was familiar with from our city's history (I've always been a history buff), and some truly beautiful pieces of artwork masquerading as tombstones. I started going back to look at these and to further my interest in local history. This led me to a pioneer cemetery on the other side of the city, which I also started visiting.
At the time I was doing websites for charities and not-for-profit groups who couldn't afford to hire someone to do websites for them. I received permission to use some research that had been done on the Pioneer Cemetery, conduct further research of my own, and finally produce a website with information regarding the cemetery and the burials. A hobby. When I had completed that I was contacted by the superintendent of the municipal cemetery and asked if I would do a similar thing for the current cemetery. I did just that. Many hundreds of hours of work, both research and computer, went into it. SWMBO and I took hundreds of photographs for the website. There were up-to-date listings of all the interments, which we updated every year. The scope of it, for the time, was monumental. (Pun intended.
) I was quite proud of the result and fond of the look of it. Finally, they decided they wanted control over it so they bought it and the Pioneer Cemetery website from me. They've integrated both into their main website now, which has necessitated many design and link changes, and a lot of it was lost. Still, a fairly good portion of the work is there. The two sites are at:Nutana (Pioneer) Cemetery
Woodlawn Cemetery
And there, in a nutshell, is my cemetery history, my interest in the art, history and sociology of cemeteries, both new world and old world.
2 comments:
Last summer my dear Dan applied for and got the contract for the maintenance of the Dorchester Pioneer Cemetary. Unfortunately, his health failed him (but he is oh so much better now!) and I stepped up to the mound as it were, to take his place. The truth is, I really got to like mowing the lawns there. It was nice to be out there in the sunshine, got lots of low impact exercise, (on slopes that no self respecing mountain goat would attempt) and wearing mosquito repellant the same strength as atomic waste. It is an interesting place, the graves date back to the 1820's, (even 1 Father of Confederation) and a lot of the marble gravestones are wearing away quickly, and i want to take rubbings of them for the community - beautiful examples of victorian funeray art. I spent hours researching the symbolism of it. There is such local history there - such as graves of people who are not there (lost at sea). And one, I will not forget, the grave of a soldier from WWI. He was not killed in battle, but rather he was sitting in his tent after the war was actually over, when a riot broke out in camp because the soldiers were not being shipped home fast enough. Shots were fired to break it up, and one got him. The Family was so angry, they had his body brought home instead of being buried in Europe. He survived the war, only to be killed by his own side.
Dan has applied for it again, and I hope he gets the contract, because I am looking forward to another summer of mowing the grass.
I'm glad that you had such a good experience with the cemetery. Those are just the same reasons I like them so much. There's some neat stories on the website that I research - one fellow, Napoleon Charpentier, whose grave was exposed in the pioneer cemetery for a year or so because of river bank slumping. Finally, a retired military man from Winnipeg became so enraged by this treatment of a veteran that he raised the funds to have the grave moved to Woodlawn Cemetery, which was now opened. Woodlawn had no record of the burial but I actually managed to find it, headstone and all, just by trying to find the area of the cemetery in use at the time. It's a great story.
In many places in Europe, cemeteries are places where people go to picnic and spend family time. It's mainly in our uptight North America where there's an unusually quiet reverence (or perhaps fear. We probably try the hardest to stave off the inevitable, and hate to be reminded of it.).
I hope Dan continues to stay healthy and well!
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