Member-only story
This Happened To Me
One Foot in the Grave
Literally
A few years back when I could still get out and move around I used to do a lot of volunteer work. One gig I did work for was with a website called Find a Grave. I had never heard of them until I started working on my family tree again. They’re a free site. It’s all cemeteries from all over the world. If you run into a roadblock it’s one more resource you can use to unlock the mystery.
Once I had happened upon them I decided that I’d sign up as a volunteer photographer. Another one of my great loves — photography. I traipsed around cemeteries and graveyards snapping photos of headstones. I’m in a rural area so there are a lot of headstones (what I call graveyards) in the middle of fields where homesteads once stood. Plus there are old cemeteries in the middle of nowhere. My guess is a town vanished or a once local church did (those are the ones I call cemeteries).
One day I was out in the middle of someone’s empty field. It was fall so the crops were harvested already for the year. It made it a lot easier for me as I could clearly see the stones, etc. I was walking and clicking away. Some stones I’d take more than one shot of in case I didn’t get it right on the first try. At one point I was aiming and shooting when suddenly half of my right leg disappeared. From the knee down…
