I just came across the Find a Grave app from Ancestry.com. Happy days. My sisters and I like a good romp through graveyards in our home area turning up old relatives… well not literally, so this might help in our quest for reconnecting.

Of course many of us don’t live anywhere near old family burial grounds so I guess the App will help us get a bit closer and maybe track down our loved and lost.

Sitting at my desk, I’ve just given Find a Grave a go, looking for a headstone I know exists in a small village in the south west of Scotland. They don’t seem to have this one on their radar at the moment, but maybe they’re working on it.  I’d love to hear how others get on using it, so let me know if you give it a try.

Find a grave … tend a grave

Our friend Nikki of Grave Concerns does a great and important job of grave tending for those who don’t live nearby.

Find Nikki on our Marketplace along with a wide range of products and services to help around death, dying, end of life planning, remembering.

Burial or cremation?

The importance of the permanence of a gravestone might help you make a decision about burial or cremation. Of course when cremation was introduced in Victorian times, many found the notion appalling. People demonstrated at the first crematorium in Woking in the 1870s. As Alison Killing’s TED talk on death and architecture remind us, 99.8% resisted the idea then. Now, only a century on, over 3 out of 4 of us opt for cremation.

I still think natural burial is best for aesthetic and environmental reasons but it does cut out the joy of finding and gravestone with all its poignant information.

I was particulary excited during a visit to the small village of Kirkcolm’s graveyard to find we have a Tunnock in our family. Anyone who is Scottish will recognise the pride I have in this claim. Not an Everest climber – though we do have a connection to Edmund Hillary – but next best thing – maybe a member of the Tunnock family.

The Tunnocks are famed for being the sole suppliers of the iconic chocolate covered cloud of heaven that is our national biscuit. It knocks spots off our other national biscuits, oatcakes and shortbread. (As I write this I’m thinking, OK most nations have their national dress, language, flower, dishes… but can there be another small nation with quite so many claims to nationhood… kilts, saltires, clans, bagpipes, thistles, haggis, Flower of Scotland, Hogmanay, golf, Scottie dogs, Loch Ness Monster, tartan, Billy Connolly. And don’t even start on our invention credentials.)

Any non-doms among you might have spotted the lauded Tunnocks teacake during the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony.

Anyway. Rambling now. As I like to do in a graveyard.

Download the Find a Grave App and let me know how you get on.

If you find great facts and connections, keep notes of the story, save and share in your Memory Box on Final Fling.