This past weekend, I went to Maine for a vacation. One day as I was driving between Belfast and Unity, I saw two headstones in a corner of someone’s front yard. The stones looked very old, and they probably are, as burials in residential yards are not very common any more.
Seeing the headstones in someone’s front yard made me wonder how common it is for people to have old graves on their property. As I looked around online, I came across an interesting story out of Tennessee. Apparently, a man was doing some landscaping in his yard and he discovered not just one, but twenty tombstones. Fortunately, there were no actual graves, just tombstones.
Of course, tombstones belong on graves, so the man wondered why the tombstones were in his yard and not in a cemetery. He turned to the internet, and searched for the name on one of the headstones. The name on the headstone is connected to a grave in Memphis National Cemetery. In fact, all of the headstones are connected to graves in that cemetery.
The story gets even more interesting. The headstones in the man’s yard missing from the cemetery. All of the graves that share the names on the headstones have headstones on them already. Cemetery records indicate that the stones were removed and replaced with updated headstones when other family members died and were subsequently added to the grave.
Still, if headstones were removed from graves and replaced with new ones, why were the old ones placed in someone’s yard? The house is not right next to the cemetery. Apparently a former owner of the house had worked for the cemetery, and brought home headstones that were incorrectly engraved. By law, the headstones should have been destroyed. The good news is that the headstones are not missing from anywhere. Unfortunately, the reason why the headstones ended up in someone’s back yard is still a mystery.
Photo by duboix on morguefile.com.