Graveyards: Aren’t they great?

Genealogists are lucky to have graveyards! Strange but true.

Cemeteries have been the focus of many field explorations by family historians and have yielded substantial information about our ancestors. Memorial information often gives researchers valuable data concerning people: name (particularly spelling); birth dates (sometimes); death dates (naturally); spouses; children; places of residence; occupations; religion (occasionally); etc. Some of the verses and poems engraved on headstones are also interesting and may offer a personal glimpse into how the deceased was viewed in life.

Almost every family history society have organized committees to record burial data, including photos of headstones. The local society in Calgary has published 15 volumes of cemetery records (available in electronic form) and allows visitors to their website to search thousands of entries of basic data of those interred, for free.

The oldest stone recording the lives of members of my family dates from the 1790s. Shown on the memorial is:

Here Lieth

the Body of

RICHARD SHEPHEARD Junior

who Died Nov. 23^d 1794 Aged 32 years

also MARY SHEPHEARD

His Mother

who died Sep. 4^h 1797 Aged 62 years

Now here we lie as you may see;

As you are now so once were we;

As we are now so Must you be;

God give you Grace to follow we.

also RICHARD SHEPHEARD Senior

who Died May 23^d 1803 Aged 76 years

Richard Jr. was my 4^th great-granduncle. His parents, Richard Sr. and Mary were my 5^th great-grandparents. All were born in Cornwood, Devon, England. Richard Jr. did marry a lady named Catherine Watts, in Cornwood. They had two children together who also went on to marry in Cornwood and have children there. After Richard’s death Catherine remarried a man named John Northmore. They moved to a nearby parish where they had seven more children. That explains why she is not on the memorial.

The above example is a little different as it starts with a child and then adds the parents’ names, although the death dates are in chronological order. The one below has the father first, the son second and the mother third. The death dates are again in order. Harriet (nee Shepheard) was my 2^nd cousin, 4 times removed.

The inscription reads:

IN

LOVING MEMORY

OF

GEORGE HAYNES,

BORN JANUARY 27^TH 1830,

DIED SEPTEMBER 13^TH 1902.

ALSO IN LOVING MEMORY OF

FRANK

THE BELOVED SON OF

GEORGE & HARRIET HAYNES,

KILLED IN ACTION IN FRANCE,

AUGUST 12^TH 1917,

INTERRED IN FOSSE 10 COMMUNAL

CEMETERY, EXTENSION, SAINS-EN-GOHELLE.

ALSO THE ABOVE

HARRIET HAYNES,

WHO DIED SEPTEMBER 8^TH 1930,

AGED 82 YEARS

The memorial indicates the son was killed in France during the Great War. He was buried there, not in Cornwood, as the information on the stone says, but he is remembered on this grave marker. Interestingly, he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force (28^th Canadian Battalion, Saskatchewan Regiment), not the British Army. We are not sure why but his attestation form showed a birth date two years later than his actual birthday – another curious fact. The memorial is correct in that it indicates his birth took place in 1885. Looks like another family story to chase down. There is quite a lot of information on this marker.

The headstone for the grave of my 4^th great-grandparents shows he was “for many years a carpenter” in Cornwood parish.

And this one for another 4^th great-granduncle, Arthur Shepheard, says he lived at Middle Rook in Cornwood parish.

Cemetery memorials and headstones have proved to be important sources of information about ancestors. Wouldn’t it be great if they went back further?

Natural Disasters and Their Effects on the Lives of our Ancestors

This blog post was originally written for the The Pharos Blog, sponsored by Pharos Teaching & Tutoring Limited. It was published on 10 April 2014. Some of the information was used in my book, Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests. I thought it appropriate to reproduce it again as I have been posting about natural phenomena, major storms being one such type of event.

I have already posted about a couple of other deadly storms (1950 Appalachian Storm and some deadly hail storms). There are a few other examples that I will comment on in later posts as they had significant impact on people and communities.

The lives and livelihoods of our ancestors were controlled or affected as much by natural conditions and events as by political and societal constraints. In many cases the latter were strongly influenced by the former. Natural phenomena directly affected the environment in which people lived and worked affecting both the physical health as well as the economic well-being of people.

Every generation has stories about living through the worst weather or natural disaster to befall mankind! And yet each generation only repeats similar stories told by previous generations. Today, through instant, world-wide communication technologies, we can see the results of major natural disasters and how they affect people locally, regionally and globally. Reports of the devastation caused by these events are readily available on television, in newspapers and, especially, on the internet, almost as they happen.

In past centuries, there is no doubt that similar disasters caused significant death and destruction, often over wide geographic areas and across broad socio-economic groups of people:

• Storms, floods, earthquakes and disease all had immediate impacts on people and communities.
• Volcanic activity, erosion of coastal margins, infilling of estuaries, drought and famine all affected living conditions and economies lasting from several months to several years.
• Gradual changes related to climate change occurred over hundreds of years and had much longer-term effects on the environment and human habitats.

In the study of the history of families and the communities in which they lived, it is instructive to consider how people were affected by, or reacted to conditions we have witnessed in more recent situations. Would your great-great-grandparents have been forced to give up their farm if they were flooded out? Would your carpenter ancestor have moved to a location where there was a great deal of work available to repair the damage caused by a major windstorm? Did any of your ancestors lose their lives when tragedy struck in the form of a natural disaster?

Major storms – one example of natural events – have inevitably resulted in significant mayhem. As a maritime nation, Britain has had its share of such events coming ashore from both the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea.

A much-written about storm, called The Great Storm, struck the south of England and parts of Europe bordering the English Channel on 26 November 1703 (7 December 1703 on the Gregorian calendar, already in use in continental Europe but not introduced to Britain until 1752). The Great Storm occurred during the height (or depth) of the Little Ice Age (1350-1850), a period of much cooler global temperatures and extremes of weather conditions.

 

Title page of The Storm by Daniel Defoe

(Used with permission of the British Library)

The storm was part of a massive counter-clockwise, very deep, low pressure trough that moved across the region, from west to east, affecting areas as far north as Birmingham and Norwich. Some of the devastation dealt to the country over the space of just a few hours included the following:

• Wind gusts possibly topping 120 mph at the peak of the storm, levelling almost everything in its path
• Over 700 ships wrecked while docked or at anchor in harbours around southern England and while still at sea, with an estimated death toll of up to 10,000 sailors
• Thirteen Royal Navy warships sunk, with the loss of over 1,500 lives; many others severely damaged
• Over 120 lives lost, and hundreds more injured on land across England and Wales
• Significant damage in towns and cities – in London over 2,000 chimney stacks blown down, demolishing parts of the houses to which they had been attached
• Tens of thousands of head of cattle and sheep lost on farms along the storm’s path
• Major parts of forests levelled
• Areas around major estuaries impacted by floods from storm surges, in many cases more dangerous than the accompanying winds
• Severe disruption to local economies just emerging from decades of recession, the effects of which felt for years afterward
• Mercantile shipping, involving fleets serving major cities like London and the export markets, disrupted for many years until replacement ships could be put to sea
• Immediate inflation of prices in foodstuffs and other goods – building materials in particular
• On the plus side, work multiplied for tradesmen such as carpenters, masons and plumbers, the latter being expert in the installation of lead sheet roofing

Losses during the storm have been estimated at about £6 million, representing about 5% of the total value of the building stock in England and Wales at the time – a very significant proportion! The potential loss for such a storm if it were to strike today might be well in excess of £10 billion.

Could it happen again? There have been other, major storms which battered Britain, causing significant property loss and numerous deaths – in October 1987 as an example. Modern improvements to sea defenses around harbours and estuaries, beach stabilization methods, inland flood control measures, early storm warning systems and rapid response of disaster teams all have aided in preventing the same levels of devastation as occurred during The Great Storm of 1703, however.

Was your family impacted by The Great Storm of 1703 or from other types of events? I am compiling examples of natural disasters and their impact on people and communities in past centuries. If any readers have such stories of events that affected their own ancestors, I would very much like to hear about them.

References:

Brayne, Martin. (2002). The Greatest Storm. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing.

Defoe, Daniel. (1704). The Storm or, a Collection of the most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters which happen’d in the Late Dreadful Tempest, both by Sea and Land. Downloaded through University of Adelaide website 30 March 2014 under Creative Commons License from http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/defoe/daniel/storm/complete.html  

Lamb, Hubert & Knud Frydendaho. (1991). Historic Storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwest Europe. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Fathers’ Day

Pictures are wonderful things to remember people by. I am fortunate that I have so many in my library that I can turn to.

My Dad was a very open man. You pretty much knew what was on his mind all the time. He rarely was angry that I can recall but there were instances, especially work-related when he was annoyed or disappointed.

William Calvin Shepheard was born 10 December 1914 in his maternal grandfather’s home in the small town of Irricana, Alberta, just 30 miles or so northeast of Calgary. He did in Calgary on 3 November 1983. I wrote about my dad on the anniversary of what would have been his 100^th birth (A Special 100^th Birthday) – 16 December 2014).

Bill was a sociable man, growing up and in his adult life. He remembered and was remembered by all of his relatives. I wrote before about the closeness of he and his cousins in the rural community in which they grew up, something many people do not experience today. (Growing Up With Cousins – 14 April 2015).

I share a few things with my father, his sometimes single-mindedness and the restlessness that enticed him to do different things in his life, even change careers. He was good with his hands and with planning and carrying out small and large building projects. I do that. He built our first family home in 1949. I designed my own family’s first house and renovated our next two. We both had/have a pride of family and, while generally satisfied with our own accomplishments and disappointed in our personal setbacks, we very much enjoyed/enjoy the success of our families. I don’t have my father’s patience, though. I’m not sure where that comes from – perhaps that Shepheard stubbornness many of our family members share.

I am very glad my sons, one of whom is also a father, inherited some of the good traits from their grandfathers. I can see things in them that are very like their ancestors. They are not afraid of tackling new challenges – much like their grandparents and great-grandparents, some of whom crossed the ocean or the continent to seek out a new life. Both are very outgoing, like their mother and her father. They do not have the great interest in family history that I have – but they still have many years left to discover it.

Anyway, at this time of year I like to remember all the fathers from our family. I also wonder how much we are like all those fathers who have gone before us and what unique traits – genetic and learned – each passed along to their sons. The one thing I can do is pull out all the photos of many of them and compare the physical aspects. Here they are, all the fathers and future fathers of my direct family line (Sorry ladies!):