May 16, 2025
Memorial Day is just around the corner. When I was a kid, Memorial Day was my favorite holiday. School had finished for the year, and summer stretched ahead in an endless stretch of sunny days.
In those days, the local Uintah Cemetery where many of my ancestors were buried was not maintained. It was unirrigated. Cheat grass, cacti and other weeds grew unchecked. A few days before Memorial Day my dad went to the cemetery to clean the graves. I went to “help,” but I mostly ran around looking at the old headstones and picking the yellow roses that survived to bloom every year on that dry hillside.
On the day itself, we picked wildflowers along the edges of the fields. After my grandfather passed, we made sure to pick the sweet-scented wild roses that were his favorite flowers. We made bouquets in old canning jars to take to the cemetery and decorate the graves.
My Swedish great grandparents were buried at the cemetery. They’d been prolific and produced eleven children. By the time I was growing up, there were dozens and dozens of children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who all visited the family graves on Memorial Day.
When we arrived with our flowers, there were already lots of other visitors. Everyone stood in the shade of the old honey locust trees that dotted the cemetery and shared memories of the family. It was the only time I saw many of my more distant cousins. We seldom had family reunions in those days, but Memorial Day was a good substitute.
I loved those days when I knew exactly what Memorial Day was for: to remember family who was gone and to catch up with family who remained. Nowadays, I live hundreds of miles from the Uintah Cemetery. I seldom make it home for Memorial Day.
Thanks to technology, I can make a virtual visit to the cemeteries where my ancestors rest. Websites such as Find a Grave and Billion Graves post pictures of headstones and sometimes even biographical sketches for graves from all over the United States and beyond.
This Memorial Day I plan to “visit” my ancestors on some of those sites. I can’t be there in person, but I can look at my ancestral graves and spend some time remembering my grandparents, parents, sibling, aunts and cousins.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society