When
you start playing rock-paper-scissors, you may intuitively consider
the paper as the weakest element and the rock as the strongest. But
the beauty of the game is showing that all three elements are just as
resistant. It just depends on how we use them.
Unless
you are very very lucky, you've been there, you've seen the paper
trail vanish in front of your eyes: lost baptismal books, torn marriage records, missing pages of a notary's archives, whole
churches burned to the ground (yeah, thank you, Carlist Wars) or
plain and simple bureaucratic stupidity.
But
of course, silly me! It is just paper! So you consider using a tougher
material. After all, that is the whole purpose of a headstone:
eternity.
Some headstones display a lot of information, besides
the usual dates of birth and death, and the FAN (Friends And
Neighbors) strategy can uncover even more data. Moreover, if you are
well versed in the subject of funerary art, you could even come up
with an accurate profile of the family's socioeconomic status. So,
again, the
strength of this resource depends
on how we use it, but also, the cultural context of our ancestors,
and our own.
I've
had avoided cemeteries as much as possible. In my culture
(catholic-based but no more, extremely urban and obsessed with
youth), you can easily ignore they even exist. But then I visited
France and found myself walking around the well kept graves by the
church of a village in Alsace. They didn't have tons of information
but many had those telling details of lives well lived and suddenly, I
didn't find it so gloomy. Then, it became easier, and, given the
chance, I would visit the cemetery whenever I visit a village.
But
when it comes to bigger towns, it is a whole other story. If they are
not glamorous historical places where you can find A-list celebrities
like Oscar Wilde in Pére Lachaise, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir together in
Montparnasse or Evita Peron in Recoleta, they can be quite sad.
 |
Left: Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise, Paris. Center: Jean Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir in Montparnasse, Paris.
Right: Eva Duarte de Perón in Recoleta, Buenos Aires. |
But
again, what are the chances of finding your great grand uncle buried
next to Jim Morrison? (Hopefully, very low, the place is a mess).
Their
big advantage is that they usually have an administrator, databases,
a direct phone number and an e-mail address (seems obvious? Well,
some of them don't). So when I started to work in Genealogy and ran
out of resources to find information about that narrow time-frame
between my elder's memories and public available data, I had to chose
rock. Luckily, at least two of the main branches of my tree had
established in the same town back in the Province of Buenos Aires,
Argentina (and their cemetery has an institutional e-mail address!).
I wrote my first email asking about my Sosas 8 and 9 with estimated
dates and got an immediate reply from the administrator. 8 was
there, and I got an exact date of death, but 9 wasn't (she was quite a character, actually). I've
continued to email for information about other ancestors so I could
ask the civil registry for death certificates, which were free of
charge if you can provide the exact date (if you can't, you can pay,
they will take your money and still not search for the records). I was filling the information gap faster than ever (except for my dear Margherite, who's date of death was missing).
Later
the same year, I had the opportunity to go home and took my parents
to a Genealogy road trip to our ancestor's town. Long story
short: the copy machine of the civil registry was broken (so,
logically, no searches), there was nobody in charge of the records in the church and the café across the main square was closed
for mourning. Everything seemed to point out in the same direction.
So we finally visited the cemetery. My contact was on vacation but I
got a glimpse of how they had their files organized: a big poster
with the coordinates of the parcels and an excel sheet that can only
be opened in a very old PC that runs on Windows 3.11. Of course they
have the original books but when we don't know the dates, it will
take them too long to find what we need.
Big
deal! All the information is carved in stone, right? Well, maybe
initially it is, but sometimes headstones or metal plaques are
removed, changed and summarized, losing all those telling details a
database can never reflect.
