Find-A-Grave growing rapidly

When I tried to enter my great grandparents into Find-A-Grave, I couldn't do so because the town where they died was not listed. I sent an e-mail asking that the town and its municipal cemetery (Queenstown, Eastern Cape) be added, and it was within a couple of hours.

Then I added my great grandparents, William Matthew Growdon and Elizabeth Growdon. He was number 111610917, and she was 11181795, which means that 122 other entries had been made in the five minutes or so it took to enter her information.

Obviously the bigger such a database is, the more useful it is to researchers, and the more useful people find it, the faster it will grow. I recently found a great deal of useful family history information because someone had taken the trouble to record the gravestone inscriptions and cemetery registers at Omaruru in Namibia, which is a long way from where I live. So Find-A-Grave is growing fast, and becoming more useful to researchers every day.

About 25 years ago the Genealogical Society of South Africa embarked on a cemetery documentation project, where members tried to record inscriptions from gravestones in as many cemeteries as possible. Some of these may still be found on NAAIRS, the computer index to the South African archives. The Worldwide Web did not exist then, and sites like Find-A-Grave are doing it in a slightly different way, and, with new technology they also make it possible to display photos of the monumental inscriptions.

We took photos of the Queenstown graves when we were passing through, so we only had time to record those of our own family. But we noticed that many graves in the cemetery had been vandalised, and that seems to be a widespread problem, so documenting them where possible is quite important.

So I'd like to encourage everyone to enter details of graves they know about in Find-A-Grave and similar sites, and, where possible, to join together with others in trying to make a complete record of local cemeteries before they are vandalised. And if anyone reading this lives near Queenstown, get busy! There are a lot more graves to record.

Untold lives II - the census

Following on from yesterday's post on Untold Lives, last night the census enumerator called. He was scared of our dogs, so gave me the form to fill in, which saves a bit of time anyway, and it always seems such a fruitless exercise, as we are told that the forms will be recycled once statistical information has been abstracted.

In the last couple of months we've been looking quite a lot at UK census information from the 19th century for our family history, and think that the census records tell us quite a lot about "untold lives".

In the 18th century we have Thomas Gray's musings in a country churchyard in England:

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

You can read the whole of Thomas Gray's Elegy written in a country churchyard here.

And a few years ago we visited the UK and in a country churchyard in Cardinham, Cornwall, found the annals of some of my 18th-century ancestors, my seventh great grandparents, William Sandercock (1705-1786) and his wife Mary Verran (1705-1786).

The inscription reads

To memory of William Sandercock who departed this life the 25th day of November 1786 Aged 80 years. And in memory of Mary his wife who died 2nd July 1786 aged 81 years. Morne not for us our children dear Tho here we lie in death We hope in heaven to meet again And there in Christ to rest.

Such were the short and simple annals of the poor in the 18th century.

But in the 20th century, having collected the information about untold lives, we wantonly destroy them. Perhaps one day the descendant of an illegal immigrant, living in a shack in an informal settlement, will want to know where he came from, and the information will have been mashed up, and turned into a percentage.

It makes filling in the census forms seem so futile.

Cemetery vandalism in Queenstown, Eastern Cape

On our recent holiday we visited Queenstown cemetery in the Eastern Cape to take photos of my great grandparents graves. It was hard to find them, and as we walked up and down looking, we passed a number of graves that had been vandalised, with headstones knocked over, and crosses broken.

Eventually we found the graves we were looking for, but though the stones were intact, the metal railings around the grave had been removed, presumbably by metal thieves. We took quite a lot of photos of them, just in case the next time we, or other members of the family try to find them, they too are lying on the ground with the inscription side down, and possibly broken into pieces.