North Weymouth Cemetery

Drought

2010-09-24T22:33:00.002-04:00

After torrential spring rains this year (2010) we had a summer of virtually no rain. Quite literally, most mowing stopped this summer. The grass turned crunchy and brown by the end of June, and only at the end of August did it start to make a comeback. It's times like this that I appreciate crab grass, the only thing that will come in green after a brief shower. While we are still in very dry conditions for this time of the year, things are better, if only on the surface.

Not knowing what the summer would look like (we've had a number of very wet summers in the past few years) I took advantage of a fantastic sale on trees at the local Big Box store. 4 good sized Linden trees for $11.00 each. Cant pass that up. To date, with much watering through out the summer, the trees seem to have survived. Hopefully they will overwinter well, and will continue to grow next year. Many of our ancient maple trees are not doing well, and they will need replacing eventually. Shade trees are an important ingredient in a beautiful cemetery.

Also perhaps because of the drought, it looks like the fall foliage is starting early. The oaks are already turning yellow, and they are usually the last trees to turn. Some maples are orange already, but those ones are usually the dying maples, which for some reason there are a lot of all around town.

Now would normally be a good time to plant grass seed, but unless the weather changes a bit more and we get some more rain, I'm not sure if this season will be a good one for grass seed. Hopefully next year will be more normal.

Pet Peeve - Trash.

2009-06-18T17:21:00.003-04:00

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

2009-05-09T17:25:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-04-19T17:01:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-04-11T21:07:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-10-16T22:29:00.002-04:00

Fall is here, and the ancient maple trees in the old section are turning brilliant yellows and orange and are already beginning to fall, creating a carpet of gold and yellow around the old slate and marble stones. Too soon they will turn brown and ugly, and will be just more work rather than beauty. Enjoy them while they last.

Cemetery Blog/ Message Board

2008-04-19T10:57:00.002-04:00

I have received a number of request from this web site related to people looking for information about ancestors. I have always thought that it would be nice if people who came by looking for the same ancestors could somehow connect. To this end, I am providing what I hope will be a place for people to find each other and share information and links.
If you like, you may leave a comment to this message with your name and email (or any web site links) and the ancestors in the North Weymouth Cemetery you would like to either learn more about or share information about. It would probably be helpful to title your reply with the surname or names you are interested in. I will check back from time to time and try to add more blog entries that deal with specific names, hopefully making it easier to find information.
If this blog does not work out for some reason, it will be removed, but I hope it can work as a message board for genealogists.