When you have fully caught the genealogy/ family history bug, one of the most important sites for this work is Find A Grave. I have found a few of my ancestors graves on there and I have a picture of what the headstones look like. It is so awesome. This site is also really great if someone has input information, like birth and death, spouse, children and parents. I have found some ancestors from this site when I could find them nowhere else.
One of the features is that if you know where your ancestor is buried, you can put out a request for someone living in the area to go to the cemetery and take a picture of the headstone for you.
My friend was recently on the site and noticed that there were 4 names that people had requested to be found at a little cemetery in Bernalillo. This is not a kept cemetery. It is volunteer run and so mostly run down.
What footwear is appropriate for tromping through a cemetery? Not flip flops, I can tell you that! Luckily my husband wasn't there to be rolling his eyes at me :0) There were goat heads everywhere. I think I pulled about 20 from my feet throughout the day and the bottom of my "shoes" were covered. What was even worse is that there was a major ant problem there so the ground was crawling with them. As you can see from that first picture there are lots of sunken graves and big huge stink bugs roaming around. I was having visions of The Mummy while we were there and it was making me a bit skittish.
What made this little adventure fun is that there was no plot information, because it isn't well kept. We did find out that the local catholic church bearing the same name is supposed to be keeping it, but they really don't. The cemetery is called "our lady of sorrows" and I couldn't help but think of how sorrowful this lady was at the disrepair of this place. There are so many unmarked graves or markers that only held paper at one time that has deteriorated into nothing . What was really interesting is that some looked like visitors had been there recently but didn't feel the need to even carve on a stone the name of their beloved to mark their grave.
There were also some interesting ones. The putting green. The monument to all babies aborted. Some interesting plant growing out of one. The super huge flyswatter. There was also a football field one that isn't pictured here and all sorts of monuments to what represented the loved ones lives.
As we were somewhat aimlessly wandering I began to worry that our efforts would be fruitless. Our ward had already done a service project for this cemetery pulling weeds and photographing every headstone. I thought that we would be trying to track down an unmarked grave. The death dates were also a bit random. Some areas had old and new dates mixed so it made it hard to focus on 1 area.
We persisted though and I may or may not have pretended to wield a sword like Indego Montoya, you killed my father prepare to die. You know, to try and find our way to the people we were looking for. We were unable to locate a secret hideout entrance in a tree trunk though. We really had to say to the people that if they wanted to be found they were going to have to lead us to them.
We had our first success finding Joshephia. It was amazing. We had just stopped to look around and try and figure out where to go next because we had already been there for 30 minutes with no luck and there she was!
The next one, we wandered around some more and I noticed off in the distance 3 men with wheelbarrows. I thought we should go ask them if they knew anything about the people that were buried there. We approached and tried to explain what it was that we were doing and that we were looking for Gilbert. When we got close enough to see the headstone one of the men was standing behind it was Gilbert. I blurted out that it was divine providence that we came to talk to him and he was standing right there. He looked at us like we were crazy white girls, because Gilbert was his friend and I'm sure couldn't figure out why we would be looking for him. We explained again and he commented about my divine remark and how he wasn't even sure why he was there that day. He told us later that he works and has a hard time making time to come and check on things.
It turns out the the 3 gentleman were life long residents of the town, so they knew or knew of almost everyone buried in there (you can see them in one of the pics). They were there to fix up some of the sunken graves. They didn't know the last 2 names on our list so we wandered around some more hoping to find one of them.
After we found our last one we ran back into one of the gentleman, Mr Montoya. He was happy that we found another one and started telling us about the people that were buried there. He had a gentle and loving countenance as he spoke of his family members and pointed out where they were. I had this compulsion to want to hug him but I held it back so he wouldn't worry again that we were weirdos.
There was only 1 lady that we couldn't find, but we think we may have found her husband and perhaps she is buried with him or near him unmarked. On our last ditch effort to find her we ran into the wife of Mr Montoya and she was super friendly and told us about all the relatives she had buried there and the history of the cemetery. She also told us many sad stories of the many young people she knew that had been shot, or beaten and one of the boys she knew that got hit by the train. She was also the one that told us about the catholic church having records of plot sales. She even wandered around with us for awhile to see if she could find the grave we were looking for.
Just as we were saying our goodbyes the rain picked up again. There was a very small window where the rain stopped and it was while we were at the cemetery (it is still raining now- which is not common for it to rain all day in NM). It was a pretty divine day. I could spend my life meeting people in this way and connecting with our past while serving a complete stranger in another state who is desperately searching for evidence of their ancestors life. I feel like an official grave hunter now and it was seriously a great and inspirational way to spend the day. I am also so grateful to have a friend who knows who to call and rope into crazy missions like this.
The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose.
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