No Longer Speaking

Yesterday, in her blog, Genealogy à la carte, Gail Dever shared a press release she had recently received. From CanadianHeadstones.com, it commemorated the crowdsourced website’s milestone of having uploaded one million headstone photographs.

While one million may seem like an immense number, when you extrapolate that number over the span of the worldwide task before us, you realize this is just a small fraction of what still needs to be done. Yet it is a worthy accomplishment.

In describing their mission, CanadianHeadstones.com noted,

[I]t is becoming harder—if not impossible—to read the inscriptions these stones originally contained. By archiving the images and transcriptions, these important records are saved.

That thought—of the disappearance of once-readable headstone inscriptions—was not lost upon me when our family walked the graveyards of our ancestral heritage in Ireland this month. We snapped what photos we could of legible monuments, but stood, wondering, in front of mute reminder of that fact. Could that blank slate have once been the headstone commemorating our ancestor? Unless someone transcribed any record of those vanished inscriptions from a prior century, we’ll have no way to know.

The ravages of time are not the only challenges facing these engraved records—whether in Canada or Ireland. Add vandals to that list—yes, even in a country like Ireland which boasts a relatively low crime rate—and the deterioration is accelerated. When I queried various online forums about the Castletown graveyard in County Limerick, someone shared a link to a 2011 article in the Limerick Leader concerning the “absolutely appalling state” of the Conyers family tomb there in which the human remains contained within two coffins had been scattered about the premises. The newspaper was reporting on the complaint made to the County Council by the witness to the desecration.

Standing, this month, with my husband in that quiet Irish graveyard—so far from any noise of traffic or neighborhood—it was hard to imagine such mistreatment happening in this bucolic location. Apparently, though, vandals know no limitations of borders.

The ruins of the churchyard confessed to us the ambience of the kindler, gentler ravages of time—only Time, which inevitably would sweep over all and make even the clearest announcements eventually mumble with weathered undulations.

The realization only galvanizes my resolve to bolster the cause of those dedicated to preserving these messages. "Etched in stone" may sound like a permanent solution, but even something as innocuous as drips of water leave their mark. I think of books I’ve seen in collections like the Allen County Public Library, where forward-thinking researchers from seventy or a hundred years ago went out and transcribed what records could be found in local cemeteries. I’m thankful for such projects. Now, those details copied onto paper are sometimes the only records left, when the stones that bore the originals have failed us.

Leaving the Castletown graveyard and the ruins of the Catholic Church once standing in its center was, for me, a melancholy parting. I couldn’t help think of those jagged shards of rock, barely clearing the ground, but obviously announcing that someone was buried in that spot. Could that have been our ancestor? Unless someone preserved that record on paper in a yet-undiscovered book, we’ll never know.

Photographs, above, piece together a panorama of the headstones found within the ruins of the Catholic church once standing at the Castletown-Conyers graveyard in County Limerick, Ireland; photographs courtesy Chris Stevens.