Memento Mori and other Gravestone Warnings - Episode 48

Susanne loves walking (and cycling) through local cemeteries, finding forgotten stories and wondering what certain inscriptions might mean.  Join Manfred and her as they discover a swashbuckling tale told be the early settlers. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Happy to Be Canadian Podcast. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, a writer who lives in rural southwestern Ontario, Canada. Each week I share an original, very short story that will have you laughing and reflecting on the simple moments of our lives. Now, on to today's episode. Happy to be Canadian, Episode 48. Memento Mori. Manford and I drove through the tunnel created by the cedars that bordered each side of the paved lane. As the branches opened up, a white wooden fence separated us from the grassy hill covered with headstones. The lane veered to the left for a loop up the hill. There was a plaque that claimed a portion of the graveyard began as the Smith Cemetery in eighteen eighteen. I can't remember the date that it became the official Mortwood Cemetery. As we drove at a snail's pace, on my right was the huge boulder that I think used to sit on the lawn of the church going up another part of the hill, further west in the village. Each year there was a fundraising auction to determine which local family's name would be painted on the surface for the next twelve months. I believe it was a friendly competition to put some money in the church's coffers. There is a brass plaque attached to it now, and the name in the final coat of paint is fading into oblivion. This day was sunny and warm enough to roll the windows down. Our truck crept up the hill, and we both called out the names that we recognized, and others that we were surprised to see commemorated in Morris. The headstones were in rows, a little haphazardly, like teeth wedged into too small the jawline. We stopped at the crest of a hill and went for a stroll among the stones. We saw one a few rows over that looked like it was a roughed-out stone apple core on top of its base. We wandered around it but couldn't recognize the shape. We wondered if it was a unique chunk of stone that had been dug out of their field. Even if we could not decipher its use, it was important to someone, and that's all that mattered. I'm a fan of cemeteries. That's called being a taphophile from Greek. Taphos is tomb, and Phila is love. The love of tombs. Some people are called tombstone tourists or cemetery enthusiasts, stopping at random burial sites or planning vacations around the famous ones. I started young with my grandmother's pants. She would take me to the cemetery where her two children, her parents, her in-laws, and other relatives, were buried, where the worst days of her life were etched in stone. Her cemetery was edged by red brick pillars with white twisted wire fencing in between. The metal gate was just a bit fancier than a livestock gate on the farm. Inside the fence, just to the right, was a hand pump for water. We would stop there, and I would wrestle with the metal handle to bring the water up to the surface. She would hold the vase under the spoke to fill it around the stalks of the gladiolas from her garden. That's where I'm going to be buried, right beside the water pump, she would say. She said it like it was a discount plot because of its proximity to the utilities. But I think she would like to be at the entrance, watching whoever came in. While the plots must have held a mountain of sadness for her, she never showed it when we were there on our pilgrimages. She would place the flowers at the base of a headstone, and then we would wander amongst the remembrances of people she had known. I've never lost that love of walking through the stones, and I've even bicycled along the paths of many local cemeteries. So it was no surprise to me that I enjoyed looking at the old stones on this sunny spring day. As we walked further from the path towards the encircling forest of barren trees, Manford called it There's one over here with a skull and crossbones on it. Really? Maybe he was a pirate. Manford had the look of someone who wanted the design inscribed on his future headstone. The pirate of Markup? I've never heard of him. Then I remembered the story of the treasure chest that was rumored to be buried in the gully that these headstones leered into. The story had been told to me when a group of local women created the big barn quilts for the East Kent Barn Quilts Rail. The property owner from a nearby farm chose the treasure chest pattern to tell their story. According to Area Lore, three men came from Toronto to Morphe in the World War I era. They offered the farmer a quarter share if he allowed them to dig on his property for a supposed buried gold. He agreed and the men started to dig. At dark, the men quit digging and said one man had to leave for Toronto, and they would recommence digging upon his return. The next day, when the farmer went to see what progress the men had made, he found that they had dug a big hole on the other side of the gully, much further away than they had suggested they would. He never again saw the diggers or his share of the treasure. So many pirates might have been involved. A few gravestones away, I saw the name Gaia carved into the base and went over for a closer look. That is my mother's mother's family, especially when spelt with an E, not an I. The name was the same as my great grandfather's Francis, with an I, not an E. But I knew that my Francis was buried a few miles away in a cemetery along Lake Erie. Could this be my great great grandfather? I knew the I branch of the family was still in this area, but I didn't know when the tree had diverged in different directions. I took a photograph of the stone so that I could investigate further. Lots of people take pictures of gravestones and they post them to a website called Find a Grave. It is a volunteer based program that allows anyone to post and add to the information on the site. This is a great resource for family and community history buffs. When I returned home, I entered the information I had found about Francis Gyatt. It turns out he was the namesake uncle of my great grandfather. The other interesting tip that concerned my grandmother's sister Netty. For all the records I've seen, that was her given name. But it seemed like it must have been a beloved pet name of someone special. On the Find a Grave website, I discovered Aunt Netty's grandmother's name was Antoinette. Coincidence? My digging also revealed that the skull and crossbones pattern was popular in the 1700s and was near the end of its use in 1828 when the man was buried in Morpeth. The design is called Memento Mauri, a Latin phrase translated to remember that you have to die. It was used to remind all who viewed the stone to live a virtuous life. Either that or be remembered as a pirate. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Happy to Be Canadian. If you would like to receive an email each Saturday morning that features new short stories and more, you can sign up on my website, www.crazy8barn.com. If you would like to meet me in person and discover another way that we tell our rural stories, please join me at a Barn Quilt Painting Workshop at our beautiful eight-sided barn in Palmyra, Ontario, along the north shore of Lake Erie. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Crazy8 Barn. If you are an Apple podcast listener and enjoyed this podcast, I would appreciate it if you could leave me a favorable review. And that lets Apple know that Happy to Be Canadian is a valuable podcast and it shares it with other potential listeners. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, and I'm Happy to Be Canadian.