[HistoricCemeterieslistserv] Submission related to cemetery research and women's history

[Charlotte Lehan]

How Women are Lost in Historic Cemeteries

1.      She gets married. Without her birth name on a monument,she can be hard to find if you don’t have her marriage records. She could benear her birth family or across town in her husband’s family cemetery. Ineither case it will take some sleuthing to find her.

2.      Her husband dies before her. Statistically, mostwives outlive their husbands, often by a decade or more. She has a lovely stonedone for her husband’s grave but then no one gets around to doing one for her.She is often buried right next to him, unmarked, and eventually forgotten.Unless the cemetery keeps good interment records that are searchable, it maybe very hard to find her.

3.      She gets married again. She may have had hername engraved on her first husband’s stone, expecting to eventually join him,but life happens and she marries someone else. If she is buried with her secondhusband under his name, it is easy to assume this is a different personaltogether, especially if she is in a different cemetery. If she doesn’t get aterminal date engraved with the first husband it looks like she has disappeared.

We have multiple cases like these in our cemetery,especially #2, so it is important to keep these possibilities in mind whendoing cemetery research related women’s history.

Charlotte Lehan, President
Pleasant View Cemetery Association
Sherwood, Oregon


Charlotte Lehan29786 SW Lehan CourtWilsonville, OR  97070503-313-8040
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://omls.oregon.gov/pipermail/historiccemeteries/attachments/20241031/2c733651/attachment.html>