And I Start Hanging Out In Cemeteries...

Why it is strange (for me, not for normal people).

1. I haven't been to a cemetery in over a decade. When I was a kid, every Memorial Day we would take a LONG drive to a cemetery to put flowers on my father's parents' grave/

2. I'm not religious.

How It Possibly Came to Be:

1. I became obsessed with the Speck murders. I was about two and lived in the neighborhood when it happened so I grew up hearing about it. About a year ago I heard the authors of "The Crime of the Century" on a radio talk show. I bought the book.  If I could go back in history and change just ONE thing......

2. I heard about www.FindAGrave.com  on a radio talk show program I think. It's kind of fun to browse. They have famous and not famous people.  People also request photos. You can look up requests based on a cemetery search or based on your zip code.

3. I am fascinated by stories of paranormal experiences, so you never know.

So me and my kids, clad in "Find-A-Grave" t-shirts, set off for Holy Cross Cemetery in Calumet City, which happens to be about 10 min. away from where my mom is. I did not know what to expect and I was really nervous. We went to the office because only a few of the photo requests had specific location information. I didn't even know if they would give such info out or if they would get perturbed because I had a long list. They actually have a touch screen with databases for that and other Catholic cemeteries. I looked up all our info and we headed out to a 'section'. Unfortunately, that's all we had to go by and the sections are pretty big; maybe half of  a city block. Back to the office. The people were unexpectedly nice; printing off a sheet for each of our requests and marking out little maps with an 'x' after pinpointing each location in a huge book of detailed maps. He even recognized the name of the Speck murder victim, Gloria Davy, who is buried there. There are already photos of her grave on the site but I wanted to visit it for personal reasons.

Again unfortunately, it was super, super hard to find these people. We spent about two hours. We only found about four of the 12 people. For awhile it looked like we might not find any of them. Now I am super pumped. it's like a puzzle trying to find these people. It's also strangely gratifying to fulfill requests for people. I didn't even find Gloria Davy's grave, which was hugely disappointing. The Find-A-Grave site is truly fabulous though. It notifies people when requests are fulfilled and it even has a button to report problems, like the one name that was not on their database.  

Then we went to see my mother, who happened to not be having a good day. Lucky for me, my sister has skipped town so I don't have to deal with her. More on her later.