Tag Archives: cemetery books

Death’s Garden contributor: Barbara Baird

Some of the stories that appeared in Death’s Garden Revisited came to me as blind submissions. I don’t know anything about Barbara Baird, except that she is a member of the Association for Gravestone Studies who lives in Vermont.

What’s your favorite thing to do in a cemetery?

I’m trained to clean old headstones responsibly and I volunteer in small village cemeteries here in Vermont. I teach anyone who is interested how to clean a stone without damaging it.

I also like the history of the community unfolding before your eyes. You recognize names on the stones of roads and farms you pass every day. And you can connect with living folks! One day, an old gentleman asked me what I was doing while I was sloshing around a stone. I told him what I do and he asked me to clean his wife’s grave a few rows over. He had come with flowers. We gussied her up together. He had buried her 40 years ago.

Tell me about your favorite cemetery.

That’s a tough one. Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts is right up there. It was the first garden cemetery in the United States. At 175 acres, it’s also an arboretum with 5,500 species of trees and shrubs. Go in spring and then again in fall — completely different experiences.

Is there a cemetery you’ve always wanted to visit?

Highgate Cemetery in London.

What would your epitaph be?

Well… that was fun.

Loren again: The contributors to Death’s Garden Revisited put together a playlist of their favorite cemetery songs. You can check it out on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4S0255SPm7grf5NShTbLgT?si=4825e0a61b994bd0

You can treat yourself to a copy of Death’s Garden Revisited:

You can also download a free copy of the Reader’s Guide from Bookfunnel. It includes discussion/contemplation questions, an interview with the editor, and a game to introduce readers to cemetery symbolism and encourage them to visit.

Death’s Garden contributor: Trilby Plants

I’ve known Trilby Plants since I was a baby writer. She was one of my mentors in the Flint Area Writers, while I was still in high school. She is an amazingly natural storyteller and a great inspiration.

She wrote a really lovely piece for Death’s Garden Revisited about visiting her relations in the graveyard.

Officially, Trilby Plants has published children’s books, fantasy, and romantic suspense. Her fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine and The Petigru Review. A proud member of the South Carolina Writers Association, she lives in Murrells Inlet, SC, where she writes, knits, and creates animated book covers and video book trailers. You can learn more about her books here.

What’s your favorite thing to do in a cemetery?

I go to cemeteries looking for ancestors. I look at the markers and think of all the stories they could tell. I have walked graveyards from the East Coast to the Midwest and discovered where people lived and died. My husband’s ancestors came to America from Germany and France traveled to the fertile farmlands of New York state, Iowa, Nebraska, and Manitoba.

In Michigan, I have touched the grave markers of my maternal ancestors who originally came from France by way of Quebec and emigrated to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri. I have seen my paternal great-grandfather’s gravestone in Canada and discovered he left Scotland in the 1840s and settled in Quebec. My paternal grandmother’s German ancestors farmed, died, and were buried in Wisconsin. I am the connection that ties all these people and their stories together.

Tell me about your favorite cemetery.

Poe’s Grave as photographed by Mason Jones

I have two favorite cemeteries for different reasons. I visited Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in Baltimore on a day when a film crew was making a movie. A man dressed in a creepy costume stood in front of Poe’s monument, which made a lasting impression on me.

My other favorite place is a cemetery in Ohio where my husband and I stopped to find an ancestor of his. Hocking Hills State Park is in the rolling terrain south of Columbus. Inside the park is Saint John the Baptist Cemetery in Benton Township, Hocking County, Ohio. My husband’s great-great-grandfather’s name is on the front of the marker and his two wives are on either side. Nobody in the family knew he was married twice. After we visited the cemetery, we drove through a long valley past green fields and the farm this ancestor worked. Seeing where people lived and died places them in a historical context and gives us history.

Is there a cemetery or gravesite you’ve always wanted to visit?

In my thirties, my sixteen-year-old brother was killed in a car crash in Washington state. I have only been to his grave once. He is buried in Silver Lake Cemetery, which is located in Cowlitz County, Washington, on a hill that overlooks Silver Lake and, in the distance, Mount St. Helens. An image of a guitar on his gravestone shows his love of music. He played a mean guitar.

What would your epitaph be?

An imaginative life well lived.

Loren again: The contributors to Death’s Garden Revisited put together a playlist of their favorite cemetery songs. You can check it out on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4S0255SPm7grf5NShTbLgT?si=4825e0a61b994bd0

You can treat yourself to a copy of Death’s Garden Revisited:

You can also download a free copy of the Reader’s Guide from Bookfunnel. It includes discussion/contemplation questions, an interview with the editor, and a game to introduce readers to cemetery symbolism and encourage them to visit.

Death’s Garden contributor: J’aime Rubio

​J’aime Rubio was born and raised in California. Besides being a mother of two, she is also an accomplished author and published journalist who has contributed her historical knowledge and investigative research to various newspapers and magazines in both California and Arizona. She is also the host of the new podcast, “Stories of the Forgotten.” Although J’aime spends most of her free time roaming cemeteries and researching the past, she also maintains her website, which links to all of her historical blogs. Her blogs focus on people and places in history, with the hope to give a voice to the voiceless, so that the forgotten will be forgotten no more.

What’s your favorite thing to do in a cemetery?

Finding the graves of the people I research so they are remembered once more. I also love just taking walks in cemeteries as well, because I feel serenity there. Cemeteries are my home away from home.

Tell me about your favorite cemetery.
I have too many cemeteries that I love dearly. I don’t think I can name one particular cemetery I love more than another, but I would have to say it is a close tie between Stockton Rural Cemetery in Stockton and Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. Both are in California.
Is there a cemetery or gravesite you’ve always wanted to visit?
If I could, I would visit my favorite author Richard Matheson’s grave, but unfortunately he was cremated and his ashes are kept private, so it is impossible.
What might your epitaph be?
The poem would be changed to a “SHE” instead of a “he” by James Whitcomb Riley ~She Is Not Dead ~ “I cannot say, and I will not say That she is dead. She is just away. With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand, She has wandered into an unknown land And left us dreaming how very fair It needs must be, since she lingers there. And you—oh you, who the wildest yearn For an old-time step, and the glad return, Think of her faring on, as dear In the love of There as the love of Here. Think of her still as the same. I say, She is not dead—she is just away.”
Do you have a favorite song about cemeteries or graveyards?

Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” and the theme from Somewhere In Time by John Barry: I would want that played at my funeral.

Loren again: The contributors to Death’s Garden Revisited put together a playlist of their favorite cemetery songs. You can check it out on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4S0255SPm7grf5NShTbLgT?si=4825e0a61b994bd0

You can treat yourself to a copy of Death’s Garden Revisited:

Death’s Garden Revisited and the Next Generation Indie Book Awards

Death’s Garden Revisited: Personal Relationships with Cemeteries was a finalist in the Travel/Travel Guide category of this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards!

The book Death’s Garden Revisited collects 40 powerful personal essays — accompanied by full-color photographs — to illustrate why people visit cemeteries. Spanning the globe from Iceland to Argentina and from Portland to Prague, Death’s Garden Revisited explores the complex web of relationships between the living and those who have passed before.

Last September, Death’s Garden Revisited came out from Blurb.com in a glorious hardcover edition full of huge, lovely cemetery photos. The colors are exquisite. The edition was everything I’d dreamed of. There’s a preview of it available on Blurb.

I’ve been wanting to create an ebook edition for people who couldn’t afford an expensive art book. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a book crammed with full-color photos would make an enormous ebook. Finally, after many hours of effort and several family crises, Death’s Garden Revisited is now available for preorder on Amazon for the kindle. Check it out here: https://amzn.to/3EzIqws.

Beth Winegarner’s San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries

One of the things that I am absolutely fascinated by is the way cities are built up over their dead. In long-lived cities like Rome or Paris or London, it’s inevitable that cemeteries from the past have been built over and forgotten. In San Francisco, which isn’t even 250 years old, the shortness of memory is more surprising.

Journalist Beth Winegarner shares my obsession with cemeteries. Her newest book is “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History,” which comes out today. In the book, she looks into the cemeteries that used to lie beneath the Presidio Parade Ground, the Asian Art Museum, what’s now a Target, and much more.

I asked her to tell us about it.

“San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History”

by Beth Winegarner

San Francisco is famous for many things: tech companies like Twitter and Uber, the cacophony of sea lions at Pier 39, the Painted Ladies houses, major earthquakes. It’s also known, especially among locals, for not having any cemeteries. 

But what if I told you that settlers established nearly 30 cemeteries in San Francisco between the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the 1770s and 1901, when city leaders banned any new burials within city limits — and that, in the process of moving 150,000 graves to Colma in the early 20th century, tens of thousands of graves were left behind? 

My new book, “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” traces the history of these burial grounds, from one at Mission Dolores where headstones still mark the grounds, to a pet cemetery hidden beneath a freeway overpass in San Francisco’s Presidio. It includes many graveyards where bodies still rest beneath the ground while residents, workers, and tourists unknowingly pass over them every day.

Writing is one of my favorite ways to connect with the history of a place, and with the place itself. In my first book, “Sacred Sonoma,” I wrote about unusual places in Sonoma County, in Northern California: Locations where people reported ineffable (or chilling) experiences, or hauntings. I dug into local history, including indigenous and settler history, and created a kind of travel guide to these sites, which remains popular to this day. 

After almost 20 years living in San Francisco, I felt like I wanted to get to know this place better, and a friend connected me with an amazing digital archive of local newspapers. Out of curiosity I looked for articles about San Francisco’s cemeteries, and began to discover just how many there were, how badly mismanaged they were in the early years of the city, and how many were forgotten. 

As San Francisco and its population expanded, graveyards were pushed farther and farther out from the city center. And with so many people coming and going, especially after the Gold Rush, the city had very little institutional memory. A cemetery would be decommissioned, its grave markers (usually wood) removed and sometimes its burials relocated, only to be rediscovered when a new generation wanted to dig sewer lines or build something. Many crews fled job sites because of what they found beneath the soil. 

After San Francisco banned burials, residents voted to move the graveyards south to a small town just outside city limits. The majority of burials, probably about 75%, were relocated, but about 25% remain in place. They’re beneath the Lincoln Park Golf Course, the Legion of Honor Museum, the Asian Art Museum, the University of San Francisco, and residential neighborhoods of the Golden Gate Park panhandle, among others. 

I became fascinated by these discoveries, and moved by the existence of so many abandoned dead. Once I started learning, I couldn’t help but write, in the hope of sharing this history with others and remembering what so many people had forgotten. It’s helped me understand San Francisco better, and I hope readers find meaning in it, too. 

“San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” by Beth Winegarner (trade paperback, 172 pages, 60 photographs), with a foreword by Roberto Lovato, author of “Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and the Revolution in the Americas,” is being published by The History Press on August 28, 2023. You can order a copy  from Amazon or directly from The History Press.

To find out more and to see dates for local and online events in connection with the book, click here.

You can also follow Beth on Instagram, where she’s posting images of the old cemeteries.

I am excited to announce that Beth will chat about all things cemeteries with me on October 27 at the San Francisco Columbarium: RSVP here.