Legacy Tree Logo
    • Dansk
      • Auto
      • English
      • Spanish
      • Portuguese, Brazil
      • Zweeds
      • Norwegian Bokmål
      • Russian

oktober 29, 2015 by Legacy Tree Genealogists 1 Comment

A Horrific Headstone on Halloween

creepy cemetery

As the Halloween tradition highlights the eerie scares of death, this is a story of a broken headstone, and how a family rallied together to bring dignity to a fascinating life. 

Halloween in the U.S. means stories of ghouls and ghosts and terrifying nightly jaunts through haunted cemeteries filled with shadowy grave markers rising above black grass. It evokes a picture of the cold night air filled with howling wolves and screeching bats flying under an icy blue moon.

Speaking of scary cemetery stories…I spent many months gathering documentation regarding a great-great-great-grandfather. Alfred Great Barker – what a fabulous middle name – was born in the late 1700s. During his lifetime, he experienced the rise of the Industrial Revolution in England, married the daughter of a doctor, supported his nine children through the ribbon-weaving industry, sang in the Coventry St. Michael’s Cathedral Choir, and carried a cane. As an adult, he left forever the land of his forefathers, sailed the Atlantic Ocean, and crossed a continent by train to live out his final years in a lonely, arid desert town situated in the American Great Basin.

After gathering all this information from documents like the U.K. Censuses, bishops’ transcripts, civil registration, newspapers, private journals, and the immigration records of Castle Garden, and after synthesizing the information into a fairly illuminating life sketch, I decided to take a trip to this ancestor’s final resting place.

Eager to view his grave monument and think through all I had learned about this person’s life, I walked up and down the rows of the tidy, small-town cemetery, searching for the only remaining physical evidence of this ancestor.

Shoes wet from the glistening dew in the grass, I made it to the final row of aged limestone headstones and began inspecting each one, searching for my ancestor’s name, when I came to this horrifying sight:

A Horrific Headstone on Halloween

This devastating scene of the fractured headstone was akin to coming across my actual ancestor, broken in half, lying in misery in the hot summer sun and frigid ice and snow, neglected, forgotten and forlorn. Well, perhaps not quite as bad as all that, but it was certainly an unpleasant shock!

Undaunted, I snapped the photograph above, then sent out an SOS to as many descendants and relatives as I knew. Within a few months, enough money was collected to commission this repair job – interestingly enough, from the exact same monument company that had chiseled the headstone 142 years earlier:

fixed headstone frontfixed headstone back

Now I am assured that throughout this haunted season and for many haunted seasons to come, while skeletons dance and goblins drool, this ancestor’s dignity will remain restored, and his headstone will continue to reflect his fascinating life.

Want to find the final resting place of your ancestor? Commission the professionals at Legacy Tree Genealogists to gather the documents you will need to track down your ancestor’s final resting place, and make that trip to your ancestor’s cemetery. Request a free quote today!

 

As the Halloween tradition highlights eerie scares, this is how a family rallied together to fix a headstone and bring dignity to an ancestor's life.

Filed Under: Onsite Tagged With: Ancestor, cemetery, family, halloween, headstone, highlights, scare, scary, tradition

Skriv et svar Annuller svar

Din e-mailadresse vil ikke blive publiceret. Krævede felter er markeret med *

  • Home
  • Careers
How to Hire a Professional Genealogist
Terms of Use Privacy Policy

© 2004 - 2025 Legacy Tree Genealogists. All rights reserved.

Cookie Consent

This site uses cookies to enhance your experience. Consent allows us to track browsing data. Opting out may affect functionality.

Functional Altid aktiv
Storage or access necessary for enabling the use of services requested by the user, or for the sole purpose of communication over an electronic network.
Preferences
Storage or access necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the user.
Statistics
Storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
Storage or access required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Vælg muligheder Administrér tjenester Administrer {vendor_count} leverandører Læs mere om disse formål
Preferences
{title} {title} {title}
Cookie Consent

This site uses cookies to enhance your experience. Consent allows us to track browsing data. Opting out may affect functionality.

Functional Altid aktiv
Storage or access necessary for enabling the use of services requested by the user, or for the sole purpose of communication over an electronic network.
Preferences
Storage or access necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the user.
Statistics
Storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
Storage or access required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Vælg muligheder Administrér tjenester Administrer {vendor_count} leverandører Læs mere om disse formål
Preferences
{title} {title} {title}