Not Just Everyone Goes Grave Hunting for a Hobby…

Two of my loves are family and history. With that sentence come visions of my Grandma Elliott’s kitchen with its red checked tablecloth, chickens and roosters everywhere, red telephone, and little ole mammy toaster cover. That’s where my heart is…that warm, secure, feel loved place I remember as a kid. I don’t want to ever forget that place or feeling, and I want to share it with my children. Thus my love for old stories, old things, old photos.
When I moved to PA recently, somewhere in my head a bell rang, and I remembered that we had ancestors buried in PA. So I went looking and sure enough, the Elliott family cemetery, is only 30 miles from here! My great-great grandparents are buried there. How cool! Finding it is going to be a day trip, I hear it’s in someones pasture and you need a 4 wheeler to get to it.
Which randomly brings me to what I wanted to share with you in the first place. There is a website called http://www.findagrave.com. You can type in your zip code and volunteer to photograph graves of loved ones for others. Or if your great grandma Wilma died in California and you’ve never been to see her headstone, you can request that someone photograph it for you. Is a nice way to “pay it forward”, and for those of us who kinda like headstones and cemeteries and grave-hopping (as my friend Kelly calls it), is an interesting hobby.

Advertisement