ramble through cemeteries

The search for the final resting place of your ancestors can actually be an adventure and at times dangerous. No one would think that walking through a cemetery would be a dangerous journey. Not all cemeteries are on flat ground especially not the one I encountered when looking for the Kohukohu cemetery in Northland New Zealand. Northland is the area above Auckland on the North Island that includes the Bay of Islands. Cemeteries are not just for those who are researching their family trees to go visit but there for all people.

When driving into town my grandfather and I were looking from the main road for a sign and an entrance for the cemetery as that’s what the website for the area said it actually was. The only signs we did see as we passed through the town was an overgrown area stating that the area was sacred ground for Maoris’. There was an unsealed road nearby and we drove up it and found an old cemetery but we both thought it was another one. The town’s folk were not that helpful either when we stopped for ice creams; they only knew of the New Kohukohu Cemetery that included service personnel up that same dirt road. The locals did in fact know someone who was knowledgeable in the area who hung around the local pie shop. The man we spoke to knew the people who we were looking for and the little cemetery that we had quickly stopped at was actually all that was left of the Old Kohukohu cemetery. Off back up the road we went driving most of the road just for a look. After turning around we went and had a quick look at the new cemetery and we both knew it was not the one we were looking for. When trying to walk the old cemetery my grandfather actually ended up falling onto his backside due to the grassy slope being slippery and steep. By an estimate the cemetery could have been on around a 40 degree angle if not steeper and very hard to walk. I checked out every headstone and couldn’t go any further as the rest of the area had been fenced off so whatever lay beyond the fence would have been no more. Trying to get up and down the slope was fun in itself as you had no choice at times but hold into the trees or even the concrete around the graves themselves. I did find some family members, but not the ones I was after and those ones had been lost to time and nature. Disappointed, but thankful we had made the trip out to the town of Kohukohu as we now knew what the place looked like and how it must have looked when my ancestors lived there.

Not all cemeteries that I journeyed to would be like the Kohukohu one I visited, but trying to follow a cemetery map by plot numbers as an exercise was actually fun. The Waikumete cemetery in Auckland sits on 108 hectares and has many religion preferences buried in certain areas like Muslim, Roman Catholic to Non Conformists. They are all interesting especially since I had never seen a head stone in Hebrew. The ones I was after were in several different areas like the Roman Catholic’s and several in the Wesleyan area. The person in the Wesleyan plots i went looking for, I was going by a picture that had been taken around the time they had been buried. Sadly I found the area to be over grown with grass and the headstones no longer existed, but you could still find the actual graves. Since the cemetery is a big one and what I thought was funny was everyplace I had to visit was nearly always on the opposite side. It meant plenty of walking, but I did find something I had never seen before and that was a mausoleum. Yes I found them and I did pretend at the time I was a zombie since I am a Buffy fan. I did learn that a coin does clean off the scum that does grow over the headstones especially when you want to read the inscription. This was exactly what I did do when I found a headstone in Palmerston north cemetery after finding the family member I was looking for and the head stone was at the time around 110 years old, even though I could have gotten the inscription from the local library or website.

Cemeteries may not sound like fun to walk around especially during the day, but they can be a gold mine of information for the family historian giving you the dates you could be looking for or even a little about the person. I have learnt the Jewish graves according to their tradition you are asked not to stand on the graves.

The notable cemeteries I have wandered through have been the Highgate Cemetery in London where Douglas Adams and Karl Marx are located and the Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise in Paris, where Jim Morrison, Chopin, Oscar Wilde and many others known throughout history have been laid to rest.