Clinton Cemetery, Lawrence, Kansas

Today I went to Clinton Cemetery to fulfill a Find A Grave request. Find A Grave is a great genealogical site that allows users to find where their ancestors are buried and get pictures of their grave site and memorial. If your ancestor isn't listed and you know where they are buried, you can build and post their memorial and then request that someone who lives nearby go take a picture of their headstone for you and post it online. When you post a request, an automatic email goes out to all of the volunteers who live nearby and hopefully, one of them will get a chance to fulfill your request. It's just a little something I can do to help out some of my fellow genealogists and since I enjoy cemeteries, with all of their interesting sculptures, epitaphs and often, scenery, it gives me an excuse to head out and do a little exploring.

Today was a little chilly, but the wind was still and the sun was out and that helped it feel a little warmer. The sky was a few incredible bright shades of blue. After traveling about fifteen miles on country roads and a few missed turns, I found the cemetery at the end of a dead end road, near Clinton Lake. The cemetery is still being used for burials and it was evident that it was being cared for, older stones were repaired and sunken stones had been re-situated on top of the soil. There is a small memorial area where you can sit and rest, and a posting area where the burials are listed, with the unknowns listed as such, which indicates that some records have been lost. Luckily, this cemetery has been well transcribed and most of the photos are already posted. The particular request I had simply involved taking a picture of the other side of the stone. Only the wife's side had been posted.

There isn't any out of the ordinary scenery to be found here but there is a pretty gated entry noting the cemetery's established date of 1864, a few nice trees as well as some craggy trees (for character perhaps) and a wooded area at the back of the cemetery. There were some examples of the usual traditional epitaphs (as I am now, so you shall be...) and stone imagery (hand pointing up to heaven as the destination) as well as a few examples of my favorite headstones, stones carved in the forms of stumps or trees. Many, but not all, of those particular types of stones were provided to Woodmen of the World (WOW) members as part of their benefits until the 1920's, when they became too expensive. Since that time, other types of markers can be purchased or may be provided to mark the graves of Woodmen in order to fulfill their obligation that no Woodmen be laid to rest in an unmarked grave.