There is an online service that this site has found very helpful, but which many of you might be pretty unfamiliar with. Namely Find a Grave. With literally millions of cemetary records! Now, some of you might find it distasteful and/or uninteresting to even write/read about this, but the fact is that we all die, and the millions of people who have died before us have left a mark of some sort behind them - memories, inventions, books written, companies started, places named after them - descendants born. And if nothing else then at least a tombstone - or perhaps not.

This article is about those tombstones, photographed by millions of people. Whether by a relative or by someone with no relation to the deceased, you can find photographs taken, and very often with history - a description however short or long - of the person in the grave.

Find a Grave is the world’s largest gravesite collection to whom anybody can contribute by registering to the service. Then you can for example wander in your local cemeteries with your camera, or while travelling visit graveyards and take photos there of graves of people that you know absolutely nothing about, but whose tombstone awakens your interest or artistic ambitions. You may never know the extent of your contributions.

In their own words: “Find a Grave was created to help people work together in our mission to document the burial locations and dispositions of everyone worldwide. It’s the best place on the internet to look for burial and other final disposition information for your family, friends, and famous people”.

Find a Grave is accessed by countless people, to their own individual ends. The end goal of this particular site, Journeys of Life, is to provide a good service to genealogists. And one step in that process is to attach as many Find a Grave contributions to the entries. Either by gathering information of the deceased, or sharing a link to a possible phtographic evidence of the person. Either way, Find a Grave is a brilliant means of bringing forth the lives of people gone before us, no matter which century they lived in.

I am attaching here a personal photograph of mine that I took years ago to commemorate the day that my grandfather would have turned 100 years old had he still lived.

My sons were small, and had fun playing with the snow in the aisles of the cemetary. And even though cemeteries are places of reverence, they are also places of lives lived right now, transcending time as only we humans know how.

Cemeteries are fine places to walk in and reflect on life, and perhaps visit a grave of your loved one. Walking those aisles, looking around at the people there, catching a squirrel sitting on a tree branch, remind us that lives matter, that people matter. That all things great and small, matter. And that the time that we take in to reflect on things, matter. That we matter. We all matter.