I Love Graveyards…and Genealogy

Labor Day Saturday, we drove up to my mother-in-law’s hometown in northeastern New Mexico because she wanted to lay flowers on her mother’s and her husband’s mother’s graves. Since it meant visiting graveyards, I was in, because I absolutely love to visit graveyards, even if I don’t know anyone present. Ask my kids and husband. And wait for their eye rolls.

This is my husband’s side of the family, who have been in New Mexico since the Spanish first arrived and before from their Indigenous genetics. I’ve actually been able to follow their lineage back to the late 1700s. Any further exploration means Santa Fe and digging through really old births, marriages, and death records.

The first grave we visited was in the Santa Rosa de Lima cemetery in the middle of town. The chapel is in ruins and one of the stacked stone walls has fallen. My husband’s grandmother, Arcelia Flores Smith rests here, along with her mother and father, Sinforo and Juanita Lucero Flores. Check out the link above for a 3D view of the chapel BEFORE the wall fell. And look at the blue of the sky in the picture.

It was hotter when we arrived at the St. Joseph cemetery, so I’m glad my mother-in-law remembered where her mother was buried. So we cleaned up the grave and placed the flowers. One story. Frances fell very ill at 29 with leukemia, and was taken to the nuns hospital in Albuquerque. Her husband, who worked in Vaughn at the time, would take the bus or train in to see her. And one day when he arrived, she was very close to death, so the nuns gathered in her room and formed a tight horseshoe around the bed to pray for Frances. When her husband, Simon, walked in and saw all of the nuns in their dark habits surrounding his wife, his heart about burst with sadness, for he was sure she had died. But instead, the next day, she recovered–a miracle–and lived for many more years. We also looked for my husband’s great grandmother–Josefita, or Grandmatita–but couldn’t find her. Next time.

The cemeteries I see in New Mexico are beautiful, not because of some straight line tidiness or velvet green lawns, but because the families come and leaves flowers and little figurines (see the little blue and white sparrow?) and toys and messages. The dead are celebrated by the living as family and treated as such. Their ghosts as memories are part of us. That’s why I gather stories about them. And there’s comfort knowing they are close and all that separates us is time.