Gone and forgotten (or not)

If you knew how quickly people would forget you after your death, you would not seek in your life to please anyone but God.

-- John Chrysostom

I shared that memeified quote on FB recently, and it spawned a few other thoughts.

In central Europe, at least, you only rent your grave. John Banner, beloved as Sgt. Schultz in "Hogan's Heroes," died on a visit to his hometown of Vienna in 1973 and was buried there, but by 1988, the grave was no longer his. His grave marker was removed because the lease had expired and was not renewed by family. (He and his wife had no children.) Someone else was buried there and a new marker erected in 1988. (We enjoy watching at least one of the two nightly episodes, every weeknight at 9 on MeTV, channel 23.2.) A fan had tracked down the grave and placed a placard honoring Banner next to the headstone of the latest occupant.

When visiting Glarus, Switzerland, the hometown of my wife's great-grandfather, in 1990, we had expected to find graves with her family name in the churchyard. We were accustomed to graveyards in New England and the British Isles with very old memorials, and earlier in the same trip had seen the Old Jewish cemetery in Prague where tombstones are stacked on each other -- 12,000 representing 100,000 burials in a tiny plot of land. We were stunned to see that all the burials in this Swiss cemetery were quite recent.

In America, the likelier fate of old graves can be seen in the work of Orange Rex, who found a book of Muskogee County death certificates from 1910 to 1916 in an Oklahoma City thrift shop, has been tracking down graves and stories of the deceased, matching entries in the register against news stories and obituaries. That link leads to the Facebook group, An American History Mystery: A Tale of Death in Muskogee Co, OK 1910-1916, where he has been documenting his research, crowdsourcing additional information, and connecting with the distant relatives of the people whose lives are documented in these ledgers. Many of the people listed are buried in long-neglected cemeteries, reconquered by nature. A few names and stories have elicited reaction descendants, and one name -- Bass Reeves -- remains well known, but most are utterly forgotten. Orange Rex has located the Harding Cemetery north of Muskogee, overgrown even though the most recent burials are as recent as the 1990s.

Orange Rex recently posted on his research into the Lieber Cemetery. It was platted in 1905 by John L. Lieber, who was the first city attorney of Muskogee, owned five theaters in the city, and was been head of the commission on land disputes for the Dawes Commission. His wife Dora was the great granddaughter of an Indian Chief. It was set aside only for burials of blacks, up to 2000 graves. He figures that as many as 1000 were buried there. Yet 117 years later, only one local historian ("former 2 time Genealogy club president and 15 year museum curator") knew about the cemetery but didn't know its name.

Orange Rex, the finder of these records, is a professional firebreather. He writes:

Only God has the right sense of humor to put a fire breather in charge of the lost paper records which might be the only records of their lives besides their bones.

I'll breathe the fire of life back into this history. Yesterday I saw a headstone for the first time of a laundry woman that died during childbirth in 1912. Sarah E Clark.

From my research.

I KNEW HER MIDDLE NAME, OCCUPATION AND HOW SHE DIED.

It was a weird sense of pride weighted with the gravity of being the keeper of that knowledge.

Tempus fugit. Memento mori.