Memory Aids

Sib4 always says I send depressing emails without warning her they're coming. So to Sib4, and anybody else who doesn't particularly like reading about death, please consider yourself warned. This one probably won't win the Happiest Blog Post of the Year award. 


Tonight Sib2 and I were starting to plan another leg of the GCW Tour. (Well, I think of it as the Tour, they may think of it as vacation.) In any case, we were poking around destinations which led to a question about where some famous person is buried and this led Sib2 to www.findagrave.com. 

Pretty fascinating stuff. They've uploaded cemetery records from all over, so with just a name, location, date or a few other identifiers you can try to figure out where someone is buried. Sadly, our first search -- for our paternal grandparents -- was fruitless, as neither one of us is entirely sure where they're buried. We thought it was a Forest Lawn in Southern California, but nothing came up. Apparently, Forest Lawn hasn't uploaded their records yet. 

But while we were trying to locate them, I went off on a tangent. Although my Dad never once spoke of it, the story we heard from Mum was that Dad had had an older brother who died before Dad was born. Since Dad was raised in Toledo, it seemed likely that his brother was buried in Ohio somewhere. I figured a search of "Streck" in Ohio might locate him.

It did. Harry Streck, born March 19, 1927, died May 28, 1928, and buried in the Lutheran Cemetery of Cleveland, Ohio. It's weird to find record of the (very short) life of someone that should've been a close relative, but died way too young, and whom you only heard mentioned once. It's also incredibly hard not to wonder what kind of life he'd have had, and how Dad's life would've been different, had he lived.

But finding barely remembered relatives was only one benefit of the site. They have some 120 million records, and one of their search features is called "Stroll Through Our Online Cemetery," which brings up random(?) records as you click through -- which I did for about 45 minutes. In the time I searched I saw the records of people who died tragically young, others who died very old, victims of well publicized horrors, people who passed quietly alone, and the full spectrum of most any other variable you can imagine.

It was interesting seeing all these lives go by, knowing that they'd their lives, made their choices, and passed on. And in a lot of cases, it's hard not to believe that without this website they'd largely be forgotten by now. How many people visit eighty year old graves? 

Of course, this made me think there needs to be another site. I mentioned that our search started with our paternal grandparents. This is because they're the only dead relatives we have that were actually buried in a grave. Everyone else has been cremated and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but shall we say "sprinkled" (or maybe "poured") somewhere out in the world. In some cases I know the location -- Dad's at the bottom of a marina on Oahu, which I only know because it was us four siblings that put him there -- but in most cases I actually don't. 

Which is what made me think that findagrave.com should have a sister site like wherewedumpedtheahes.com. I'd certainly be willing to look up the name of the marina where we left Dad and record it on a website somewhere. It was oddly comforting to find record of Uncle Harry, but once the sibs and my nieces and nephews are gone, no one's going to remember Dad, or even be able to randomly come across a remembrance of him on a website. That seems a little sad.

And let's be truthful here, in talking about Dad I'm really talking about me. I can't help but wonder who's going to remember me. I don't particularly want a grave, but I can't say disappearing into the ether forever sounds all that appealing either. 

I definitely need to email the findagrave.com people and give them my suggestion for wherewedumpedtheashes.