More cemetery pics
Feb. 8th, 2005 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kayreWarm weather melted nearly all the snow cover, but fresh snow is on the way, so I took advantage of the break to revisit the cemetery cluster. There are a dozen pics here (in a very strange order; I parked in a Catholic cemetery, walked through both Jewish cemeteries, across to the municipal cemetery, and back by way of the newer Jewish cemetery!), or my favorite five
Discovered I was wrong; of the five cemeteries, one is municipal, two are Catholic, and two are Jewish. Temple Beth-El Memorial Garden is newer, and would be indistinguishable from the Catholics next door except for one line of Hebrew text on most stones, and the occasional Star of David. B'nai Shalom is older (oldest date of death I could find was 1901, but there are a couple of indecipherable stones that are older in style), and much more distinctive.
First, though, this one's from the Catholic cemetery. The moment I saw this, I thought, "it's a bird.... it's a plane... it's SuperJesus!"
I guess it's true that Leonard Nimoy took the Vulcan greeting gesture from Judaism? What's it mean? I love the custom of placing stones on the headstone.
I was surprised to see a lamb in the Jewish cemetery, but of course its Christian meaning comes from our Jewish roots... and a lamb as a symbol for an innocent child works in any culture with sheep, I suspect. This is also dated far later than the similar stones in my municipal cemeteries, where it's usually between 1850 to 1950 at the very latest.
On to the municipal cemetery.. this is that statue in the ravine, near the creek. It says, I think, "Still to Thy cross I cling." No inscription on the back; I wonder if there's anything more on the base? Such an odd place for a monument.... I still want to know more.
Climbed down into that ivy-covered niche... this is what I found.
I had one startling and sad moment today. The municipal cemetery is very large. Much of it is laid out with a lot of interconnecting roads, sort of a wavy grid. At the back, there's one large loop that connects in only one spot, and another loop sprouting from that. The far-back loop is newest, and includes a "low-cost" burial area, as well as lots of room for growth. That first loop, though, puzzled me; the dates of death range from 1900, nearly as old as the oldest part of the rest of the cemetery, to around 1970. Then I started to notice the names, One at a time, they'd just be slightly unusual names, but with a couple hundred together..... I suddenly realized I was in the 'colored section' from before the Civil Rights era. (Probably the reason there's no such section at my usual cemetery is that they didn't allow blacks at all.)
The children's section of the municipal cemetery, like several others in the area, shows waves of infant and toddler deaths in 1920-1922, and 1928-1929. I wonder what happened? It must have been a terrible decade for young families.
The older Jewish cemetery, B'nai Shalom, has a disproportionate number of deaths during the years of the two World Wars, especially WWII, and not all of them military. That's making me curious too.
Discovered I was wrong; of the five cemeteries, one is municipal, two are Catholic, and two are Jewish. Temple Beth-El Memorial Garden is newer, and would be indistinguishable from the Catholics next door except for one line of Hebrew text on most stones, and the occasional Star of David. B'nai Shalom is older (oldest date of death I could find was 1901, but there are a couple of indecipherable stones that are older in style), and much more distinctive.
First, though, this one's from the Catholic cemetery. The moment I saw this, I thought, "it's a bird.... it's a plane... it's SuperJesus!"
I guess it's true that Leonard Nimoy took the Vulcan greeting gesture from Judaism? What's it mean? I love the custom of placing stones on the headstone.
I was surprised to see a lamb in the Jewish cemetery, but of course its Christian meaning comes from our Jewish roots... and a lamb as a symbol for an innocent child works in any culture with sheep, I suspect. This is also dated far later than the similar stones in my municipal cemeteries, where it's usually between 1850 to 1950 at the very latest.
On to the municipal cemetery.. this is that statue in the ravine, near the creek. It says, I think, "Still to Thy cross I cling." No inscription on the back; I wonder if there's anything more on the base? Such an odd place for a monument.... I still want to know more.
Climbed down into that ivy-covered niche... this is what I found.
I had one startling and sad moment today. The municipal cemetery is very large. Much of it is laid out with a lot of interconnecting roads, sort of a wavy grid. At the back, there's one large loop that connects in only one spot, and another loop sprouting from that. The far-back loop is newest, and includes a "low-cost" burial area, as well as lots of room for growth. That first loop, though, puzzled me; the dates of death range from 1900, nearly as old as the oldest part of the rest of the cemetery, to around 1970. Then I started to notice the names, One at a time, they'd just be slightly unusual names, but with a couple hundred together..... I suddenly realized I was in the 'colored section' from before the Civil Rights era. (Probably the reason there's no such section at my usual cemetery is that they didn't allow blacks at all.)
The children's section of the municipal cemetery, like several others in the area, shows waves of infant and toddler deaths in 1920-1922, and 1928-1929. I wonder what happened? It must have been a terrible decade for young families.
The older Jewish cemetery, B'nai Shalom, has a disproportionate number of deaths during the years of the two World Wars, especially WWII, and not all of them military. That's making me curious too.
