Speaking for the Dead by Karen Everett

The obsession of Genealogy.  I don't know how to explain the passion of genealogy to people who don't understand the hunt for the past.  Some people find this hunt boring, my grandmother Lucille Hazel Brown Seager Alderman, did not like looking into the past.  I started bugging her when I was a small child, about who her parents where; who her grandparents were, what she was like as a girl.  She could have cared less about the past, or my insatiably curiosity about the past.  I finally found out a little about my great great grandparents in 1979, when I spent the summer in upstate New York.  I found out what their names were; names and nothing beyond that.  I thought it was just me she did not talk to about the past, but after her death I found out she just did not care about the past.  Despite being my grandmother, I am the polar opposite of her; I am driven by a thirst for the knowledge of the past, the people that built our families,our communities, our country and the greater world  The study of history is great, but it is the story of the individual that gets lost in the sands of time.  I would lay in my bed as a little girl, and wonder what my great great great grandmothers name was, what did she look like, what made her laugh and cry;  would I too be forgotten in a mere one hundred years, would anyone care who I was, or would my great great great grandchild lay in a bed and wonder about me.  Technology has made the hunt and preservation of the past easier, but we are working against time, as documents, gravestones, and knowledge are being lost. Yes famous people get remembered, but most of us are not famous, and only those in our families will even care to remember us.  This is so very sad, as ordinary people are the ones that really matter.  The smile of a mother, the laugh of a father, the squeal of a child, these are the memories that need to be remembered by all of us. 
The stones at Howard Cemetery are sometimes the only monument to those wonderful brief ordinary lives. When they were erected, those families thought they would always stand and be a monument to their loved ones.  Well the planet did not have air pollution and acid rain when those limestone and marble stones were erected, but because of modern society those stones are falling apart. People did not move and travel as much then; as we do now, family were surely be around to tend the graves.  Well families moved and can't tend the stones.  So we all have a obligation to our collective past, to help where we can; not just to remember our own relatives, but the past of the communities where we live.  I am just so thrilled that so many people are preserving the history of individuals and wanting to get involved in cemetery preservation.