Category: Cemeteries

How Genealogy Helps Children Cope With Death

10/28/2016

Last week, my husband and his extended family experienced the passing of the family's matriarch, my children's great-grandmother. It was not their first experience with the loss of a loved one, but they still asked many of the normal questions about why people die, what death means, and what happens to our bodies vs. our spirits - normal things you would expect a child to ask.

However, I have been impressed at my kids' maturity in talking openly about death and to seemingly accept it as a part of life, even more than some adults seem to. Could this be because we talk about death (more than the average family) when I teach them about our ancestors and our family's history? Could it be because we take regular visits to cemeteries, and talk about how death is simply a part of life?

Although sorrow will always be a part of coping with the deaths of loved ones, children are not born with an inherent fear of death - it is something they learn from the people around them. Openly and regularly talking about the cycle of life and death makes the subject less taboo and less intimidating to children.

I love creating and using timelines with my children to teach family history, because they help them visualize the complete span of a person's life and the life events included within that span. Death is one of those events - an event that none of us completely understand from a spiritual perspective. But seeing death as a life event common to every person who has come before us is a powerful thing to be able to visualize, especially for a child. Understanding the universality of death and mourning doesn't necessarily make us less sad or angry when someone we love dies, but I do think it gives us a greater sense of acceptance and closure, especially if we believe in some version of a spiritual afterlife.

And as genealogists, we deal heavily in memories, especially memories of loved ones who are no longer with us in the flesh. I'm always sharing memories of my grandparents with my children, and I've now encouraged them to discuss memories of their deceased great-grandparents, as a way to keep them "alive" within us.

Our family does not share Mexican ancestry, but one of my favorite holidays that has elements which I think every family should embrace is Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Drawing on both indigenous and Catholic traditions, Dia de lost Meurtos festivities remember, celebrate, and welcome back the spirits of dead loved ones. Family members build altars (ofrendas) to honor their ancestors and visit cemeteries to clean and decorate grave sites. Though individual traditions can vary from place to place, most Día de los Muertos festivities generally take on a happy, celebratory tone, instead of a mournful one.

I am curious as to what other people think. Do you think that regularly discussing our ancestors with our children can help them process the mystery of death any better than children who don't know anything about their family history?

As always, thanks for reading! If you are interested in learning more about Día de los Muertos, check out these links below!

Kid-Friendly Resources About Día de los Muertos:
Teacher Page - MexicanSugarSkull.com
Day of the Dead - Smithsonian Latino Center
Día de los Muertos - National Geographic Society
Day of the Dead - National Geographic Kids
Day of the Dead History, Activities, and Resources - ArtIsFun.com

©2016 Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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Cemetery Freestyling With Kids

9/26/2016

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Cemetery Freestyling with Kids from GrowingLittleLeaves.com

Cemetery Freestyling. Is that a real phrase? Well, if it wasn't before today, it is now. Cemetery freestyling is what I call going to a cemetery for no reason. You aren't going to visit, look for, or photograph any particular grave or group of graves. You're not looking for people of any specific time period or surname or for any specific grave symbols or shapes. You go just to go - maybe with the intent of getting some mild exercise or just getting out to enjoy nature a little bit.

I've previously written about doing organized cemetery scavenger hunts with my kids, but we also LOVE cemetery freestyling, especially when we travel to different places. It's a great way to learn about local history, people, and burial customs. We've done it with our kids in Memphis, New Orleans, and even just a county over in Indianapolis, but we had never done it in our own town until this past weekend.

We are not locals to this town, and neither I nor my husband have any ancestors who ever lived in this area. We've lived here for only about five years, but, to our kids, this is really the only home they've ever known. My 3rd grade son had mentioned that they have talked a little bit about town history in school recently, so I thought, 'Why not take a little walk through the local cemetery and see what we can find?'

One of the great things about not looking for anything specific is that you can let the child(ren) guide your path through the cemetery. They are then free to gravitate towards what appeals to them aesthetically, explore what they find interesting, and formulate their own questions about individual graves and grave markers.

Indeed, the first aspects of the stones that kids tend to notice are the differences in shapes, sizes, and colors. As we walked through the cemetery, I asked my kids questions like, "What shape do you like best? Why do you like it? Which stone shape do you think was the hardest to carve?" I think when we adults are on a mission to find a particular stone or family plot in a cemetery, we tend to bypass some of the wonderfully beautiful and artistic stones and stone carvings that belong to other families, so I highly recommend cemetery freestyling for adults as well!

My daughter's favorite stone.

Without any suggestion from me, my son brought along his sketch book. He loves to draw, so I thought maybe he wanted to sketch some of the more unique stones, but instead he decided to write down a list of surnames that caught his eye. (He is a bit of a busy-body and likes to have something to do, even when we just do things for fun.)

I followed along next to him and coaxed him to look at information beyond just the surname. He discovered that one stone listed the grave's occupant as a member of the Ohio Cavalry, while another was written in German, so we talked about how a person might be born in one location, but buried in another. Stones can give important clues about a person's place of birth.

I also encouraged my son to use the years listed on the stones and figure out how old a person was at the time of death. So, we had some practical math mixed in there, too.

Ohio Cavalry Member

German Writing

My daughter is just learning how to read, so my husband and I had to read her the names when she asked what they said. However, she does understand how to read years, and she had a good time practicing that skill when looking at the stones.

Reading the years.

We found U.S. Military Veterans from the Mexican War, Civil War, WWI, and WWII. We found entire families buried together, and talked about family plots. We found stones bearing the names of town streets and parks, and talked about how town landmarks are often named after local pioneer leaders or the families who once owned the land. For example, we found this older stone bearing the name of Morton Green. Green Street is one of the major roads in our town, and I asked the kids if they thought maybe it was named after him. We came back home and confirmed via Google that indeed it was. And we also thought it was cool that we found a person born in the 1700s in the cemetery - not terribly common in this area of Indiana.

Gravestone of Morton Green, one of our town's major street namesakes!

Autumn is a GREAT time to visit cemeteries, so whether you are traveling to a new place or sticking around your hometown, I encourage you to bring the kids to a cemetery - ANY cemetery - and see what you can all find and learn!

©2016 Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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A Cemetery Program for Children

6/20/2015

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Last weekend, Growing Little Leaves, in conjunction with the Indiana Historical Society, held its first children's educational cemetery program. The event took place at Indianapolis' Crown Hill Cemetery. About a dozen children, ranging in ages from four and a half years to young teenagers, along with their caretakers, participated in the two-hour program.

We started out by talking a little bit about what a cemetery is and what people do at a cemetery. Most of the kids HAD visited a cemetery before, which was great news, but for most of them, it was their first visit to Crown Hill. Then, we talked about what kinds of important information we can learn from gravestones, and how that information can be helpful in learning about a particular person or family. I explained that symbols on gravestones can also tell us a lot about a deceased person's life - perhaps what organizations s/he may have belonged to or what s/he may have done for a living.

I designed some 'cemetery hunt' worksheets for the kids to get them looking more closely at the information on the gravestones, but before we started the search, we discussed cemetery safety and etiquette. I created a simple handout for them listing important rules when visiting a cemetery, and most of these rules can be applied when visiting any cemetery:

The hunt lasted about 15-20 minutes. We stayed in only one section of the cemetery, so that we could easily reconvene. After the search, we were given a tour by one of Crown Hill's knowledgeable guides. He told us a little more about the history of the cemetery, and gave the kids a short lesson on how to find particular graves using the section maps that the cemetery office has on file. He took us around to the graves of some of the more well-known people buried in that area of the cemetery, including author James Whitcomb Riley, where he read us one of his poems at his grave site.

A Cemetery Program for Children // GrowingLittleLeaves.com

After the guide's tour was over, we came back together as a group and I showed the kids a bunch of 4x6 inch photos of unique gravestones and symbols that I had taken throughout this and other cemeteries. We talked a little bit about religious, fraternal organization ('clubs' for grown-ups), ethnic, military, and occupational symbols and engravings. I showed them photos from modern-day stones depicting intricate portraits, landscapes, and symbols related to a person's likes, talents, and/or hobbies. I really hope the kids came out of the program with a better sense of just how much they can learn in a cemetery, and how valuable cemeteries are in learning about the history of a place and its people.

If you'd like to hear more details about our program, please feel free to contact me. A program like this could be done in ANY cemetery, and I'd love to see more genealogical and historical societies offer them for children in their areas.

©2015, Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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Cemetery Scavenger Hunt

10/21/2014

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Cemetery Scavenger Hunt // GrowingLittleLeaves.com

Last spring, I wrote this blog post about why it is important to regularly take children to cemeteries. Unfortunately, we do not live anywhere near where our ancestors are buried, but that doesn't mean that I can't still take them to local cemeteries and teach them cemetery etiquette. I came up with a way in which to make a cemetery trip interactive and a little more exciting than it would normally be for a child.

I had visited Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis with my daughter over the summer. The HUGE cemetery has a wide variety of monument engravings and sculptures, so I thought it would be the perfect place to come back with my kids and have them look for some of the unique statues and symbols found throughout the cemetery.

Before arranging a cemetery scavenger hunt with your child(ren), I highly recommend first visiting the cemetery on your own to decide which section(s) will be part of your hunt. At that time, you can look for interesting statues and monument shapes and engravings that you want your child(ren) to search for. If you plan on bringing along a larger group of children and adults (like a scouting group, for instance), stop by the cemetery office, too, to ask permission and to make sure they know when you will be there.

On the way to the cemetery, I also reminded my kids (ages 4 and 6 1/2) how to act at the cemetery. No stepping or climbing on the gravestones (unless the monument includes a bench), no running, and to be quiet if we see someone paying respects at a grave.

Here is the checklist I wrote and printed out for my son before we left for the cemetery. I gave it to him he read through it on the drive to the cemetery.

I printed out two checklists for my 4 year old daughter. One listed colors and the other listed the letters of the alphabet. She can recognize most of the letters, but I had to help her read the color words. Since I knew what we were searching for and where those items were located, I guided them to the right sections and gave hints when necessary. Since this cemetery is so large, I did drive us around to interesting sections that were not adjacent to each other.

My son ended up finding everything on his list, and my daughter found all of the letters. There were a couple of colors we did not see, but overall, the hunt went very well.

Coins on James Whitcomb Riley's Grave

A Tennis Racquet!

Indiana State Flag!

Statue of A Woman

Indianapolis Colts owner Robert Irsay

An Angel and a Cross

Checking Off Letters on Her List

Soldier's Grave (We brought a flag to share.)

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Take Your Kids to Cemeteries (Please)

3/26/2014

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I was intending to write a blog post about taking children to cemeteries sometime in the future, but last week, something happened not far from where I live that motivated me to write it today. Two boys, ages six and ten, vandalized the oldest cemetery in Boone County, Indiana. The full story can be viewed at this link.

I don't ever recall hearing about a case in which children as young as these boys vandalized a cemetery. To me, it's difficult to get angry at the boys alone, especially the six year old. Clearly, the adults in these kids' lives have failed to instill any sort of respect that, as adults, most of us inherently have for cemeteries. But I think we can ALL learn from this unfortunate occurrence, and try to do better to keep the kids in our lives from going down this same path.

But how do children learn to be reverent towards cemeteries? How do they learn about what those headstones represent and who is actually buried under those headstones?

Death is not as much a part of young children's lives as it used to be. People are living longer and longer; most children these days don't even experience the death of a grandparent until they are at least teenagers, sometimes even later than that. That means that they may never step foot in a cemetery as a child, unless their parents, grandparents and other relatives TAKE them there to pay respects to earlier generations.

In my opinion, we, as a society, need to be more open and upfront with young children about death and dying. How many people will not bring young children to a wake, funeral service, or cemetery burial because they are trying to 'protect' them from sadness and other negative emotions? Yes, losing a loved one is sad, and you should acknowledge those emotions with your children and grieve with them, but young children really have no inherent fear of death; they learn that fear from adults and popular media. I don't want my children to fear going to a cemetery; I don't want them to think they are bad or scary places.

Take Your Children to Cemeteries // GrowingLittleLeaves.com

So, please take the kids in your lives to cemeteries. Teaching them how to be respectful doesn't mean that you have to be somber the whole time. Make a trip to the cemetery a celebration of a loved one's life. I have a friend who takes her young boys to 'visit' their great-grandmother every year on her birthday, and they have cupcakes together. Last Memorial Day weekend, we took our kids to my grandparents' grave. They saw all of the flags by the graves, so we talked about what that meant. We brought some flowers and my daughter enjoyed putting them by the grave.

©2014, copyright Emily Kowalski Schroeder. All rights reserved.