The Family Grave Site (Carnmoney Belfast N’Ireland)

The sad thing about families moving and immigrating we leave no one at home to tend our parents graves. When I was a boy my father took me with him to visit my mothers grave. We did this on a Sunday afternoon by getting the bus to the end of the Antrim Road and then walking through green fields to the cemetery. When my mother died in1939 we were poor and the world was at war, we could not afford a proper headstone to mark her grave. Her resting place was marked only by a rusty tag with the plot number on it and a empty jar centered in the middle of the mound for flowers. In those distance times the Carnmoney cemetery was quite small and seemed to be far out in the countryside.  At the time of my fathers death in 1960 the family had a nice headstone and surround erected. By this time the cemetery had grown much larger than I remembered from my youth.

By the mid seventies early eighties all the Rodgers family had moved away, some to Canada others to New Zealand.  In the mid 1980’s Susannah and I visited the grave, we had trouble finding it as so much had changed. No longer surrounded by green fields the city had move out to take over the countryside. Nevertheless the grave site looked clean and cared for. Linda and I came back again around 2004 to find the cemetery had expanded to both sides of the new highway, the place was huge and it took us some time for find my parents grave site.   I was saddened to see the state of our once beautiful white headstone and surround. It looked dirty and neglected and even though I cleaned it up as best I could, it remained in a sorry condition. Just recently my Nephew John Hamilton, who’s father is also buried here, decided it was time to fix the problem once and for all. He had the old headstone replace with the black marble as shown in the last of the three photos. Of those photos the clean white grave was taken around the time of my sister May’s death in 1979.  The sad and neglected one was taken by me in 2004. The beautiful new headstone was erected in September 2015. Thank you John, it is a wonderful improvement and will be a lasting tribute and memory to those who have gone before us.

God Bless and keep reading