Family cemeteries offer a window into the past, but many if not most are not well tended; who will care for them?

The Swinford Cemetery in Harrison County, Kentucky, is maintained well. (Photo by Michael Swensen)

Jane Thomas honors her grandfather by tending the
family cemetery and beekeeping. (Photo by Jesse Barber)

Many if not most old family cemeteries have been long neglected, but they offer history and family connections that could be honored, Sarah Hume of Denison University writes for the Louisville Courier Journal. She received the Mary Withers Rural Writing Fellowship from Boyd's Station, a nonprofit arts and journalism residency program in Harrison County, Kentucky.

There are hundreds of family cemeteries "in Harrison County and across Kentucky," Hume writes. "Some are hidden behind barns, some prominently placed in front of homes. Others are tucked into quiet forests that were once active farms or churchyards." But for financial and ecological reasons, more Americans are choosing cremation, so family grave plots and cemeteries may become relics of the past, especially in rural areas that are losing population.

The National Funeral Directors Association estimates that by 2040, nearly 80% of Americans will choose cremation. "One of these days, these are going to be gone,” Denny Lipscombe, a local historian who researches cemeteries in Harrison County, told Hume. “And there needs to be some kind of documentation that these are here.” Lipscombe's life work became documenting family cemeteries with the details of who lived there and what they did, Hume writes.

Hume tells the story of Jane Thomas, who restored her family cemetery when she moved back to Harrison County "to care for her sick father . . . Thomas remembered her grandfather had once kept bees to make honey. She decided to start the practice again. . . . When she cares for the bees, she sometimes leans down to read the inscriptions on the grave markers."

Family cemeteries may become obsolete, but caring for them may offer solace and grace to some. “There’s a feeling of completion. Like full circle, maybe,” Thomas told Hume. “And I never stop thinking about the fact that I stand on their shoulders. What they went through, and what they endured, and what they did, made it possible for me to be.”