My expeditions to the closest cemetery to my home, Holy Trinity Anglican Cemetery, happened in two stages. In the beginning of July on the 13th, later in August on the 23rd. The reason for the large gap between expeditions was the fact that the camera I use went on vacation -- to Ontario for one month and then British Columbia for a week. (Which has prompted me to consider purchasing my own camera for grave hunting expeditions.)
The expedition in July was done in the company of my two and half year old nephew, who loved the Anglican church but wasn't so enthused about Auntie taking photographs of graves. That day was split into two visits, one with the nephew and one while he was napping to get photo collection and inscriptions for about sixty of the graves.
The visit on August 23rd didn't just result in a complete transcription of the churchyard however. I went to the churchyard with Mom this time and while there we ran into three senior individuals who were looking for St. Luke's Anglican Church which was decommissioned approximately five years ago. They were to view the building to see if it would be suitable for their new church building as their community's church had burned down five months ago during the winter. So we visited, talked about Holy Trinity as a church and the cemetery, as well as St. Luke's (church with no cemetery), and St. Martin's in Briarlea (church with cemetery).
Visit concluded the three individuals went off to find St Luke's, Mom began to walk home as that had been what she'd planned to do, and I started photographing graves starting in the opposite corner of the churchyard so I didn't photograph graves that I'd covered back in July. I only covered twenty-one graves though before the batteries died in the camera. So I sighed and began the drive home and realised half way to my destination that I had the camera case with me at the churchyard -- the case with the extra batteries. But I decided that as I wasn't wearing sunscreen and it was a very sunny day I should probably get indoors anyways.
Loading the new photos onto my laptop, I began immediately compiling a photo directory with inscription information. Done that, I went back and reorganized July's data. Making and reorganizing the photo directories I discovered that I'd overlapped gravestones which means that I might actually be done with Holy Trinity but will know for sure when I compile a combined burial and gravestone record for the cemetery in the form of a transcript and map.
The expedition in July was done in the company of my two and half year old nephew, who loved the Anglican church but wasn't so enthused about Auntie taking photographs of graves. That day was split into two visits, one with the nephew and one while he was napping to get photo collection and inscriptions for about sixty of the graves.
The visit on August 23rd didn't just result in a complete transcription of the churchyard however. I went to the churchyard with Mom this time and while there we ran into three senior individuals who were looking for St. Luke's Anglican Church which was decommissioned approximately five years ago. They were to view the building to see if it would be suitable for their new church building as their community's church had burned down five months ago during the winter. So we visited, talked about Holy Trinity as a church and the cemetery, as well as St. Luke's (church with no cemetery), and St. Martin's in Briarlea (church with cemetery).
Visit concluded the three individuals went off to find St Luke's, Mom began to walk home as that had been what she'd planned to do, and I started photographing graves starting in the opposite corner of the churchyard so I didn't photograph graves that I'd covered back in July. I only covered twenty-one graves though before the batteries died in the camera. So I sighed and began the drive home and realised half way to my destination that I had the camera case with me at the churchyard -- the case with the extra batteries. But I decided that as I wasn't wearing sunscreen and it was a very sunny day I should probably get indoors anyways.
Loading the new photos onto my laptop, I began immediately compiling a photo directory with inscription information. Done that, I went back and reorganized July's data. Making and reorganizing the photo directories I discovered that I'd overlapped gravestones which means that I might actually be done with Holy Trinity but will know for sure when I compile a combined burial and gravestone record for the cemetery in the form of a transcript and map.
The third visit is to finalize the churchyard map as I realized that while I was certain I had a complete transcription of the churchyard on August 23rd, I didn't know the spatial locality of all the graves (oops!), to make sure I've documented all the markers, and take some better photographs of certain markers because of cloudy weather back in July.
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