u/shortstackkk

Hi all! I wanted to introduce myself and share some thoughts. I’ll call myself B for short. I live in the US. For the past year or so, I’ve been fulfilling requests for photos in cemeteries located around me. I am so glad the good weather has hit me again and I can be out and about again.

My journey with filling requests started one day when a woman asked me and my fiancé if we were volunteering for Find a Grave. We have a cemetery extremely close to our house, and we were walking through. I’d heard of Find a Grave before but had never heard of the photo request aspect. We told her no, she explained, we all carried on, but when I got home I looked into and signed up to volunteer. I’ve been increasingly into it ever since.

One thing, I never imagined how grateful people would be! It never occurred to me I would be thanked, or that the photos would even be necessarily noticed. I don’t do it for recognition but truth be told it makes it feel so rewarding. Honestly, my main reasons for being so attracted to volunteering was that the cemetery is so close to my house, it doesn’t cost any money to do it, and it was an excuse to leave alone for a bit. It’s turned into something that I genuinely enjoy, and the messages of appreciation come all the time. More often than not.

I’m still learning a lot and love untangling webs as I stand there and look at names on headstones and realizing there’s several with the same surname, reading their bios, untangling and piecing back together. Some days I don’t fill many requests cause I was too busy getting emotional about people who died a century(or two, or three) before I was born. Some days I focus on requests with plot info, but truly love walking through stone by stone and finding a matching name. In a way I feel connected to them. I hope they know someone still very much cares about their stories.

Sometimes I bring my 4 year old with me(she knows no touching, absolutely no trinket grabbing) and I think to myself how thrilled I’d be if after I’m dead there’s a child visiting my gravestone, asking what my stone says. It’s opening up some great conversations too but that’s another post.

Sorry for the length.

B