Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Tombstone Tuesday: Distant Cousins Edition



I always feel a sense of dread and weary necessity whenever I take photos in the "Babyland" portion of a cemetery. Not a happy place, yet there is a longing to preserve the memories of those buried there, often more than adults. These children had fewer records in their short lives, fewer chances of being remembered through documentation.
These siblings are buried next to each other in Woodlawn Cemetery, Crowley, Louisiana. I do not know their first names yet. I am still pouring over my piles of discovered information from my road trip. At some point, I can give you their names. For now you can call them my third cousins once-removed.

2 comments:

  1. I wonder if they even had names - often stillborn babies do not.

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  2. In the mid 1950s, I was in elementary school in Jacksonville, Florida, and my class took a field trip to Kingsley Plantation near Jacksonville. On the way, the car I was traveling in stopped at a site where there were three apparently abandoned gravestones, and we all got out to take a look. It might have been the remains of a private cemetery, and it dated from the 1800s. The saddest thing was that one of the tombstones was marked with a name which I remember to this day, Jessalyn Rawlings, and the word "baby." At about 8 years old, I thought that the saddest thing I had seen in my young life, and I still remember it.

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