Pet Peeve - Trash.

One of my pet peeves at the cemetery is that people leave trash behind their headstones. When they come to put in new flowers or other orniments, they simply take the old stuff and place it behind the stone. This occurs in sections that have trash barrels.
I equate leaving trash behind your stone with going to someone's house, bringing a cup of coffee, and leaving the empty cup behind the sofa. You would never do that (I hope), but some people feel it's not their job to remove what they originally brought in.
There are thousands of headstones in the cemetery. There is absolutely no way anyone is going to visit the backs of every stone to pick up trash. That's why there are barrels.

Another pet peeve is when people throw plastic trash into the woods. There are large tracts of woodsy hills in the cemetery, and I have no problems with people throwing leave, grass, pumpkins, even bush clippings well into the woods. It all turns to loam eventually. But plastic, glass and metal will remain for many many years, and they will look ugly for years. Put these items in, or at least by, the barrels for pick up. Any plants or planters should have all non-organic matter removed (ie bows, plastic berries, etc) before they are tossed.

Last pet peeve is when people bring in new decorations, but do not remove the old ones. "Out with the old, in with the new" please. It's cleaner, neater, and prettier, and easier to maintain.

Memorial Day

It's two weeks before Memorial Day. Like every year, it's an insane fight to get 14ish acres of cemetery cleaned of leaves and then mowed and trimmed, while still doing burials that come up and fighting the weather. Every year its the same thing. This year seems worse, as I think Memorial Day weekend is earlier than usual. Most of the leaves have been picked up, and we've already mowed five large sections of the cemetery. But the killer is that no matter how hard you try, the grass keeps on growing, so you can mow one section one week, but you can never have all the sections trim for Memorial Day. It's virtually impossible.
Then there are the mechanical issues, mowers that break down, whips that break. It's always something. As hard as we try, and much as we break our backs to do all the areas, we will always miss something, or we will think we did everything and literally in the three days of the weekend, the grass will grow enough to make it look like we hadn't touched it. That's just the way it is.
You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. But we do try.

This Saturday the 18th I was able to photograph a large number of stones on the Western hill of the cemetery. These stones are mostly from the mid 1700's to early 1800's and include slate and marble stones. The weather was cloudy but warm, which made for good photographs. I actually realize that too much sun isn't that good, because it makes the exposure too bright and creates shadows. These pictures turned out well I think. But I'm not done yet. I'll label them when I can.

I've recently gone back and finished putting names and some dates on the photo's of gravestones that I took last spring. I have more to post, but I hope that this will at least provide a good starting point for a lot of people looking for relatives or doing genealogy. I've done my best to get the info correct, but I know that the stones are very hard to read at times, or the photo was not the best. Still, it's something.
I am hopeful that this spring I will be able to get a lot more of the old slate stones on the Western hill photographed before the leaves come out and shade them too much, but that will of course depend on the weather.
If anyone has a good photo of a stone in the cemetery that they would like to post, I would be happy to include it on the Flickr site, just e-mail it to me. Right now I am mostly concentrating on the slate and marble stones, but I will occasionally put in a granite one if it's interesting or historically significant, or unique in some way.