What If You Were Cremated and Your Ashes Scattered – 52 Ancestors # 17, Cemetery

Like many (?most I would guess) genealogists, I love walking through cemeteries especially ones where family are buried, but even ones where I don’t have ancestors.  I have blogged about various cemetery visits over the years, with the most recent one about my trip to Texas and the San Antonio National Cemetery.  I think my first purposeful trip to a cemetery in search of family was in 2007 when I was in Ft. Wayne at the Allen County Library.  I didn’t post about it until much later, though, in a piece I wrote about my husband’s maternal grandfather which only briefly reported that trip to the cemetery.  When I think about walking through cemeteries, I think of the stones with their names and dates – sometimes with much more information about the person and/or the family.

However, as I was thinking about this topic and what I might write about, it occurred to me that both my own parents and my aunt and uncle in Texas were cremated and their ashes scattered in various places that don’t include any memorial stone (or record of the scattering for that matter).  And then I started thinking, what happens for the future genealogists who are looking for any of these four people and can’t find any burial or cemetery information?  In these four cases there are no cemeteries or other specific places to visit, and no memorial stones with name and dates.  I use findagrave.com often to add to my information about a person and his or her family, but can cases like my parents be found there?

Being me, I interrupted my writing and went to findagrave.com to see about how cremation was handled and whether you could add a memorial with no cemetery name or location.  It turns out cremation is an optional choice in creating the memorial and you don’t have to add a cemetery.  It is possible to create a memorial for someone using just their name and a date (maybe not even a date, I don’t know that yet).  Having never created one before, I ended up making a memorial for my mother and for my father, and then figuring out how to link them, and finally how to link my mother to her parents (who were referenced in the piece on the San Antonio National Cemetery).  Although I have a picture of my father’s father’s gravestone, no one has made a memorial for him on findagrave and of course there is no picture.  My next task is to create one, then to create one for my paternal grandmother (who was buried but no stone has ever been placed), and to link them as spouses and then link them as parents for my father.

I am relieved to discover that cremation and ashes having been scattered does not prevent creating a page for the person on findagrave.com.  One of my thoughts had been that future genealogists would lose that information for the ancestors who chose cremation.  There is still the issue of the stories about what an ancestor chose, and where they requested their ashes be scattered or put, and whether they cared about having a physical marker anywhere.  I know each case involves at least one story, often more than one, and these don’t always get passed down in the family.  While I don’t think findagrave.com is necessarily the best location for such additional information, I do hope that family members and/or the family genealogist (that would be me!) will get the stories written and thus somehow preserved for the future.