K-Cafe. Middle Village.
I stared at this receipt from February 10, 2007, for several minutes before remembering what the K-Cafe was, and why I was there.
The K-Cafe is a food stand at the K-Mart inside the Metropolitan Mall in Middle Village. Middle Village and the 11379 zip code are not in Flushing, as recorded on this receipt.
I was in Middle Village on cemetery detail, searching for a grave on behalf of a correspondent in Iceland whose forebears are buried at Mt. Olivet Cemetery. Mt. Olivet is next door to the mall, and partly visible from the upper-level parking lot.
This encounter with the Iceland family tree-tracer was particularly and surprisingly unpleasant, and partly accounted for my exit from the practice of finding graves for people.
I usually feel a need to explain the value and purpose of cemetery photography, though maybe this need to explain is manufactured by my self-doubt and pretensions. At any rate, since it is not exactly a mainstream activity, let me explain.
For a few years I did cemetery photography, grandly called forensic genealogy, on a semi-professional basis. People contacted me with information on burial sites of their forebears at New York City cemeteries, and I would walk or take a bus out to the yard to find and photograph the grave stones. By some estimates as much as 40% of the American population had some ancestors who lived in New York City. On account of that estimate it is further surmised that a significant percentage of Americans have ancestors buried in the area.
The value in this pursuit is in finding information on the tombstone that exists nowhere else. I helped many researchers, family tree-tracers, and even police detectives and lawyers connect some dots. But I also managed to open up new mysteries for families in faraway places who saw these tomb stones and found names they never knew.
“Who,” one woman asked, “is that woman on my grandfather’s tombstone?”
Other correspondents made similarly vexed comments when my photos arrived. The most surprising thing I learned from this pursuit was how many tombstones have errors on them. Dates of birth are often wrong, names are misspelled or missing altogether, and other attempts at factual information are frequently blundered. The expression “set in stone” sounds different to me now. In the past I might have thought it described something of factual authority, or even gospel. Now I think of it as something unchangeable, even when erroneous.
There was real joy in the pursuit for me. My contribution is far from the depth of mapping one’s genome to illuminate their heredity I think that I helped bring people’s pasts alive. These tombstone photos made random and unexpected connections for people trying to piece together and understand their heritage.
I did this for free for some time but found that there was enough demand for the job that I should charge a nominal fee if only to justify the sometimes laborious task of finding these grave sites. It could take hours to find a burial site, particularly at cemeteries with which I was not familiar (such as Mt. Olivet).
The fee ended up being a wash. Most genealogists never paid me at all, a symptom (perhaps) of the Internet-induced presumption that everything should be free, including people’s time and efforts.
I never pursued non-payments. The money was never as important to me as the quest and the reactions from the families or researchers who were invariably happy to see the grave stones, or simply satisfied to know that no marker existed.
The encounter with this individual in Iceland, however, was different. She was just an unpleasant person, lobbing anti-Americanisms and suggesting that I was an incompetent liar when I found that her ancestors had no tombstone at their burial site.
A large portion of burials at Mt. Olivet are unmarked, I explained, so it should come as a disappointment but no great surprise to find that the location had no marker. Indeed, the burial she sought was in a particular field which had virtually no tombstones for any of the burials.
Her reactions were so needlessly rude that it was weird, but it was not just her prickly attitude that turned me away from the pursuit of forensic genealogy. Unmarked graves were becoming my most common find. The futility of coming up empty-handed so often got depressing. The lack of agreed-upon payment from most of the genealogists did not help, but the surprisingly brusque altercation with this Icelander was a last straw. I decided to just forget about it.
I still help people out if they contact me directly and pay me up front, but I no longer solicit my time or services for cemetery photography. I still wander the great yards of New York (mostly in Queens) where I get photos of tombstones for the purpose of researching the names on the Internet. I have discovered a number of interesting people this way, people whose reputations might merit only a footnote in history books but whose accomplishments and livelihoods interest me.
