Tombstones: SHEPHERD

I’m finding writing about this prompt really difficult because so far I have never come across any tombstones of ancestors that I haven’t already written about. Just last night I was talking to my husband about it. “Using this prompt to write about an ancestor is really hard” “What about that tombstone down south” he said” the one on my family’s grave?”

More than fifteen years ago during a prolonged trip around New Zealand we went looking for where my husband’s grandparents were buried in the Eastern Cemetery in Invercargill. The staff in the cemetery office  gave us directions and we found the grave easily. The grave was very simple, just a raised concrete edging around the outside and the word SHEPHERD on the plaque, sadly the centre had sunken in a bit too. We both got a surprise when the office staff told us who else was buried in this very simple grave. Not only my husband’s grandparents, Solomon and Hildred Shepherd, but their son Wilfred aged 31 and a daughter Joyce aged just six weeks! 

I wrote this about Wilfred in week 15

An uncle of my husband was an inpatient at a psychiatric hospital called Seacliff. We visited what is left of the place a couple of years ago and were saddened to read about an historic fire that took the lives of 37 women who were in a locked ward. This happened on December 8 1947 and due to a staffing shortage there was no staff member on duty in the ward, and it was only checked every two hours during the night. night. The image is a clip from this page https://sites.google.com/site/historyofseacliff/home/1942-fire

“We can’t just leave it like that” I said turning to my husband “What do you think about having a plaque put on with all the names on it and have the grave tidied up at the same time?”

After consulting with his sister, we approaching a local funeral director to make the arrangements.  As it was going to take several weeks to be done, we continued on our trip. Sometime later we received and email with a picture of the plaque which we shared with the rest of the family.

But wait as they say There’s more

Skip forward to late 2017. My husband said to me one day “Which cemetery is Dad buried in?” His father had passed away in 1993. I phoned the funeral director who answered my question with “Oh yes, he’s on the shelf just above my desk, would you like them!!”

Well that was a huge surprise, Rob, who in his last months had been so particular with his own funeral arrangements, right down to the wording of the newspaper notice had failed to make any decisions about what would happen to his ashes. We did collect them and for several months the small casket sat in my home office. “Now what?”

As luck would have it we were planning a trip back down to the South Island sometime in 1918. A short call to the office at Invercargill’s Eastern Cemetery, who again were very helpful and we arranged to take Rob’s ashes with us and add them in the family plot.

The staff had prepared the grave for us, a small site had been dug and a little chromed shovel provided for us to fill I the hole once Rob’s remains had been placed in the grave.

Later that day we visited the same funeral director to make arrangements for Rob’s details to be added to the plaque. Again, several weeks later an email arrived with a photograph of the amended plaque.