A Visit to the Cemetery

I never thought I'd be one of those genealogy nerds who goes to cemeteries, searches for deceased family members, and makes rubbings of tombstones.  It seemed a bit ghoulish, and unnecessary considering the amount of information you can access online about ancestors. But last Friday, my husband and I went to a Catholic cemetery in Los Angeles where many of his family members are buried.  We were searching for dates for several people whose records we could not acess online. 

Like so many cemeteries, this one was beautiful.  It was a lovely day, the grass was green, the sky blue, and the rolling hills of the cemetery quite peaceful.  We had to stop in the office first, and it took some time to access the names we were searching for - they were not digitized, so an employee had to go back and search in some old books.  We found most of the people we were looking for, and were able to read the headstones  to get the dates.  In other words, we didn't have to do  rubbings in order to read them.  I was happy about that - I would have felt silly. 

While there, we stopped by the graves of my husband's grandparents, Anthony and Madalena.  They had changed their surname many years ago from Eterovich to Terich.  We were surprised to see, however, that their headstones were inscribed with the original Croatian name.

Before we left, we placed some flowers on a few of the graves, and spent a few moments reflecting on the people whose graves we visited - all immigrants from Croatia - and on their lives, their courage, their fortitude and their legacies.