A Canadian Family, Photo Archives - http://acanadianfamily.wordpress.com/

Unlike Shakespeare’s Juliet, I could never expect to meet my ancestors “on the morrow” however many of you already know that I like nothing better during my summer vacation than to prowl around graveyards peering at old tombstones. My long suffering husband Bill has supported me in this by accompanying me on several camping trips to cemeteries as far away as Gloucester, New Brunswick, and the Quebec regions of Kamouarska and the Gaspesie.

After hundreds of hours searching I have found a few of our ancestors’ resting places, but not as many as I had expected to. This is because of something I hadn’t known beforehand which is that in many cases graveyards are dug up, moved or re-used after a certain period of time. Very frustrating!

Ah well, I’ve still had fun collecting headstone images and after studying the work of other cemetery hobbiests (it’s more popular than you’d think), I learned that many genealogists and family historians are posting their images online to help others who might not be able to visit those areas. This is another form of collaborative genealogy (like posting DNA lineages and creating genealogy bookmark sets) that will gradually help everyone.

So in order to share these photos with ourselves and others, I’ve opened a flickr account and uploaded the first batch of pictures (Headstones of St-Joachim Cemetery, Paquetville, N.B., Can). flickr is a great place to store photos from an organization point of view because we can search them using tag and append descriptions and notes.

If you’d like to visit just tap on one of the Flickr images in the sidebar to your right.

And for now, sleep well and pleasant dreams!

Cemeteries