Vichnaya Pam'yat
I think about death a lot. I want to be clear that it is not because I want to die. I’m not depressed. Well, I am depressed, but I assure you that it’s just regular depressed. I started researching my family’s genealogy when my great-uncle died in 20161. He did not get married or have children (…. that we know about….). I scanned all his meticulously kept photo albums and realized there was a lot I didn’t know about my ancestors. Today, there’s still a hell of a lot I don’t know, but I have the beginning of our story in this country, and the documentation to back it up.
When you are researching genealogy, almost everybody is dead. What remains, in the public record, is mainly names and dates and places, like vital statistics records: birth, marriage and death; census records, up to 1921 in Canada (minus Newfoundland), or 1926 in prairie provinces, or 1950 (!) in the United States; family origin stories in local history books; mentions across over 100+ years of newspaper archives; and often a carved piece of stone sitting with other carved stones (and often some wooden crosses in particularly historic locations) in a big field.
My genealogy hobby led to another hobby: photographing gravestones for the website FindAGrave.com. Some of the users on the site have had accounts for over 20 years and added hundreds of thousands of entries. They used to take photos on film, and then develop, scan, and upload them! Smart phones have made things a lot easier. Genealogy websites like Ancestry and familysearch.org use Find a Grave as a source, and Ancestry actually owns it now, but luckily the site stayed free to use.
It started when I photographed my great-grandparents2. Then I photographed every other stone in the row they were in. I am especially proud that before I started, I could not read Cyrillic. I taught myself to sound it out in order to be able to match the graves to the cemetery records during the transcription process. Within a few summers, I photographed and transcribed the entire cemetery. Then I started on the cemetery next to it. I should be finished next summer.
So far, I’ve added about 19,000 photos to the website. I hope that I helped some people piece together their families. It’s very pleasant to walk the rows when the weather is nice. I usually listen to podcasts.
Because of my frequent research of the dead, and hours spent at cemeteries, I lied to myself that grief wouldn’t hit me as hard. After all, I research and document dead people all the time. Then my sisters and I lost our Baba, our last living grandparent, almost two years ago3. It was not unexpected. It was time. She was almost 90. She had dementia and hadn’t recognized us in a long time, and her body was failing. I was shocked by how badly it hurt. It still hurts very much. I think about her often and go have a chat with her every time I visit her and her eternal neighbours.
Love you