Genealogy Addict, I am

Sunday, February 24, 2013

AMUSING TOMBSTONE INSCRIPTIONS

On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:

Here lies

Ezekial Aikle

Age 102

The Good Die Young.

In a London, England cemetery:

Ann Mann

Here lies Ann Mann,

Who lived an old maid

But died an old Mann.

Dec. 8, 1767

In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery:

Anna Wallace

The children of Israel wanted bread

And the Lord sent them manna,

Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,

And the Devil sent him Anna.

Playing with names in a Ruidoso, New Mexico, cemetery:

Here lies

Johnny Yeast

Pardon me

For not rising.

Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery:

Here lies the body

of Jonathan Blake

Stepped on the gas

Instead of the brake.

In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery:

Here lays Butch,

We planted him raw.

He was quick on the trigger,

But slow on the draw.

A widow wrote this epitaph in a Vermont cemetery:

Sacred to the memory of

my husband John Barnes

who died January 3, 1803

His comely young widow, aged 23, has

many qualifications of a good wife, and

yearns to be comforted.

A lawyer's epitaph in England:

Sir John Strange

Here lies an honest lawyer,

And that is Strange.

Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont:

I was somebody.

Who, is no business

Of yours.

Lester Moore was a Wells, Fargo Co. station agent for Naco, Arizona in

the cowboy days of the 1880's. He's buried in the Boot Hill Cemetery

in Tombstone, Arizona:

Here lies Lester Moore

Four slugs from a .44

No Les No More.

In a Georgia cemetery:

"I told you I was sick!"

John Penny's epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:

Reader if cash thou art

In want of any

Dig 4 feet deep

And thou wilt find a Penny.

On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia:

She always said her feet were killing her

but nobody believed her.

In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:

On the 22nd of June

- Jonathan Fiddle -

Went out of tune.

Anna Hopewell's grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont has an epitaph that

sounds like something from a Three Stooges movie:

Here lies the body of our Anna

Done to death by a banana

It wasn't the fruit that laid her low

But the skin of the thing that made her go.

More fun with names with Owen Moore in Battersea, London, England:

Gone away

Owin' more

Than he could pay.

Someone in Winslow, Maine didn't like Mr. Wood:

In Memory of Beza Wood

Departed this life

Nov. 2, 1837

Aged 45 yrs.

Here lies one Wood

Enclosed in wood

One Wood

Within another.

The outer wood

Is very good:

We cannot praise

The other.

On a grave from the 1880's in Nantucket, Massachusetts:

Under the sod and under the trees

Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.

He is not here, there's only the pod:

Pease shelled out and went to God.

The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania is almost a

consumer tip:

Who was fatally burned

March 21, 1870

by the explosion of a lamp

filled with "R.E. Danforth's

Non-Explosive Burning Fluid"

Oops! Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York:

Born 1903--Died 1942

Looked up the elevator shaft to see if

the car was on the way down. It was.

In a Thurmont, Maryland, cemetery:

Here lies an Atheist

All dressed up

And no place to go.

I want relatives I can find!!!

Ancestors

Yep -- I want ancestors with names like Rudimentary Montagnard or
Melchizedick von Steubenhoffmannschild or Spetznatz Gianfortoni, not
William Brown or John Hunter or Mary Abbott.

I want ancestors who could read and write, had their children baptized
In recognized houses of worship, went to school, purchased land, left
Detailed wills (naming a huge extended family as legatees), had their
Photographs taken once a year -- subsequently putting said pictures in elaborate
isinglass frames annotated with calligraphic inscriptions, and carved
voluble and informative inscriptions in their headstones. I want
relatives who managed to bury their predecessors in established, still-extant
(and indexed) cemeteries.

I want family members who wrote memoirs, who enlisted in the military
as officers and who served in strategically important (and well
documented) skirmishes. I want relatives who served as councilmen, schoolteachers,
county clerks and town historians. I want relatives who 'religiously' wrote in
the family Bible, journaling every little event and detailing the familial
relationship of every visitor.

In the case of immigrant progenitors, I want them to have arrived only
in those years wherein passenger lists were indexed by National Archives,
and I want them to have applied for citizenship, and to have done so only
in those jurisdictions which have since established indices.
I want relatives who were patriotic and clubby, who joined every
patrimonial society they could find, who kept diaries, and listed all
their addresses, who had paintings made of their horses, and who dated every
piece of paper they touched. I want forebears who were wealthy enough
to afford, and to keep for generations, the tribal homestead, and who left
all the aforementioned pictures and diaries and journals intact in the library.

But most of all, I want relatives I can find!!!

Barbara A. Brown

* Ms. Brown's "I Want" article was originally posted in 1994 to the National
Genealogical Conference, FIDO bulletin board forum.

You Know You Are A Genealogy Addict When...

1. You brake for libraries.
2. You hyperventilate at the sight of an old cemetery.
3. You would rather browse in a cemetery than a shopping mall.
4. You would rather read census schedules than a good book.
5. You are more interested in what happened in 1697 than 1997.
6. Jenkins, Murray and Godwin are household names, but you can't remember what to call the dog.
7. You can pinpoint Harriieysham, Hawkhurst, Kent, but you can't locate your state capitol on the map.
8. You know every register of deeds in the state by name, but they lock the doors when they see you coming.
9. You store your clothes under the bed, because your closet is full of books and papers.
10. You eat on the patio all the time because your dining room table is hidden by unsorted papers and there
are files in every chair.
11. All of your correspondence begins "Dear Cousin".
12. You have traced every one of your ancestral lines back to Adam and Eve, have it documented, and still
don't want to quit.
13. You check out mailing lists looking for "real" cousins.
14. You're thrilled to get an e-mail with a BOOK attachment of part of your family.
15. When you introduce yourself, you always add "I'm looking for dead relatives!"
16. You eat at the computer.
17. You get withdrawal pains when you have to leave the computer.
18. Your computer stays on 24 hours a day and you check your e-mail every hour.