Austin, Minnesota couple married in cemetery

I love this story in yesterday's St. Paul Pioneer Press. A couple in Austin in Southern Minnesota were married this past Saturday near their parents' graves in Austin's Oakwood Cemetery so their parents could be at the wedding. Their engagement began in the cemetery after the couple reconnected via Facebook.


Click here for the full story and a picture.

Family History Month and Halloween: celebrate together

It's easy to do this by taking advantage of a cemetery tour in your area. October brings historical cemetery tours in many localities. Beware of the ghosts!

I found these examples:

• Alexandria, Virginia:  www.alexcolonialtours.com/graveyard.html
• Atlanta, Georgia:  www.oaklandcemetery.com/capturingHalloween.html
• Northfield, Minnesota:  www.northfieldhistory.org/
• Biloxi, Mississippi:  www.gulfcoast.org/events/index.cfm?EventID=1761
• Carson City, Nevada:  http://carsonnow.org/event/10/13/2010/friends-low-places-carson-city-cemetery-tour

The easy way to find them is to do a keyword search in your favorite search engine. Try keyword combinations like these:

• cemetery tour history
• cemetery tour histor*
• Halloween cemetery tour
• cemetery tour Atlanta
• cemetery tour St. Paul
• cemetery tour Tennessee

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 65 years ago today, the Soviet Army liberated the Jewish prisoners who remained at Auschwitz-Berkenau which combined were the largest of the Holocaust death camps.

A CBS news story gives details of the elderly survivors who revisited the camps today. That story said "By the end of World War II, at least 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also non-Jewish Poles, Gypsies and others, had died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau or from starvation, disease and forced labor. Some 6 million Jews overall were killed in the Holocaust." This makes me shudder. I grew up in a St. Paul neighborhood that was home to many Jewish families. One of my high school and college jobs was in a clothing store owned by a Jewish family. Today, my interest in family history makes me wonder how many of those friends and neighbors suffered the loss of family members in the horrific camps.

I read another news story today -- about the desecration of tombstones in a Jewish cemetery in France. How sad at anytime, but today it seems especially cruel.

Tombstone Tuesday -- only because of a kind student

Back in the 1990s I was teaching a class at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. That was pre-PowerPoint days! I don't remember what the class topic was but it included an overhead of a letter from a cemetery I had contacted in the 1980s.

It was from Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California. A lady in the class, Shirley, said that this cemetery was right by her house. As the years have passed, Shirley and her cohorts from Montana have become special friends of mine.

Fast forward to 2002 when the Federation of Genealogical Societies was to have its conference in Ontario, California. Shirley gave me an offer I could not resist -- when I arrived there she would drive me to the cemetery to visit the graves and take pictures. The graves are of a great granduncle Frederick Slaker and his family. Frederick is a brother of my great great grandmother Emma Slaker Stuart. The other sibling was Louis Slaker. The are Germans who settled in Wisconsin. Fred and Lou and their families ended up in the Los Angeles area.

More than just drive me to the cemetery, Shirley went there ahead of time, got a map, and scouted out the area where the graves are located. All this because I taught a class.