Taphophile Tragics

Taphophile Tragics # 10

2012-02-27T22:00:00.003+11:00

She looks ... well ... almost angelic, as she coquettishly loiters within Waverley Cemetery. However, I have a suspicion that even angels, when they grow up, get into strife. On gossamer wings, glide on over to Sydney Eye to assess my evidence.

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Welcome to the tenth week of Taphophile Tragics.

Your contribution is most welcome. Please ensure that you include some details of the cemetery in which you took your photographs. As you are surely all appreciating, a few of our number have meandered through burial grounds in wierd and wonderful places all around the globe.

Please link directly to your post, rather than simply to your blog in general. Mr Linky opens at 10pm Monday, Sydney time (GMT+11). When you can, please visit the other contributing bloggers to show your appreciation of their endeavours. Due to time zone variations and overcrowded schedules, some contributions are made later than Tuesday/Wednesday.

Taphophile Tragics # 9

2012-02-20T22:00:00.003+11:00

W. Bayfield, Esq., wore his heart on his sleeve, thought I, before mentally squishing him beneath my grinding heel. That one's for you, Maud.

William John Bayfield was a mechanic who lived in Waverley, with his wife Louisa Maud, who performed 'home duties'. They married in 1926 when Maud was 44 already.

However, upon reflection, it occurred to me that there may be another meaning to amiable than that which is currently in use. I note it is related to the Latin 'amare' meaning 'to love' (amo, amare, amavi, amatum). Any ideas?

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Welcome to the ninth week of Taphophile Tragics.We welcomed a number of new contributors last week, and our numbers, to use twitterese, are trending. I spent an hour and a half walking Waverley Cemetery very early on Sunday morning. It would take more than a year of Sundays to do the place justice.

Your contribution is most welcome. Please link directly to your post, rather than simply to your blog in general. Mr Linky opens at 10pm Monday, Sydney time (GMT+11). When you can, please visit the other contributing bloggers to show your appreciation of their endeavours.

Taphophile Tragics # 8

2012-02-13T22:00:00.000+11:00

This grave marker is in Port Macquarie General Cemetery, which is on the side of a gently sloping hill. It is not the best maintained country cemetery I have wandered. The grass was badly in need of a mow, but they have suffered from a surfeit of rain for the last few weeks. Quite a few graves and their markers were showing wear and tare, not so much from vandalism, but the effects of wind and rain. Name plates tumbled down, fences off hinges, markers subsiding. But lots of stories within. I cover one such story in my own post this week.

What I did find remarkable in the Port cemetery, is the amount of inlaid tiling. There must have been a monumental mason who also held a tiling shop. It seemed to be one way of decorating the cemetery. Someone had also gone around with lots of plastic/silk flowers which were everywhere, even on markers erected during the late 19th early 20th centuries.

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Welcome to the eighth week of Taphophile Tragics. After a most traumatic week organising a nursing home for my brother who has suffered a stroke, I eventually managed to visit each post. I am loving this immense learning curve that I am on. Hope you are each on one, too.I can go into cemeteries now and see things that I would have overlooked just 8 weeks ago. I can draw links to other cemeteries, especially regarding style.

Please link directly to your post, rather than simply to your blog in general. Mr Linky opens at 10pm Monday, Sydney time (GMT+11). When you can, please visit the contributing bloggers to show your appreciation of their endeavours.

Taphophile Tragics # 7

2012-02-06T22:00:00.001+11:00

Graveyard, St Jude's, Randwick

Last week, CaT from Boston asked in her comment why this sort of exercise is called a 'meme'. With a shrug of my shoulders, I set to work finding an answer.

In his 1989 book, 'The Selfish Gene', Richard Dawkins wrote (on page 192)

'We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.'

The French word même means 'same'. Dawkins was waffling on about biological replication, so it is important not to take OUR use of the expression too preciously. Although, it is possible to see some slight correlation of behaviour patterns:

Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts.
Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread and mutate.
Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their host.

Memes are equivalent to the musical variation upon a theme.

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Welcome to the seventh week of Taphophile Tragics. I knew I should not have mentioned numbers last week! Shall not do so again, says she gesturing skywards. However, your contributions are still magnificently detailed and diverse. They make engrossing reading. I continue to monitor the links daily, all week, and am managing to eventually visit everyone who posts. I appreciate each contribution, the effort put into researching, and especially the increasing equilibrium of image and text.

Please link directly to your post, rather than simply to your blog in general. Mr Linky opens at 10pm Monday, Sydney time (GMT+11). When you can, please visit the contributing bloggers to show your appreciation of their endeavours.

Taphophile Tragics # 6

2012-01-30T22:00:00.003+11:00

Being a frequenter of graveyards and cemeteries, it stands to reason that I am also heavily into family history.

In Taphophile Tragics # 2 , I showed you the resting place of one of my great great grand mothers. Now, if I am right - and as I work it out a bit like a tennis draw, there is a chance that I have the bull by the horns - each of us has 8 great great grand mothers and 8 GGGFs.

In TT2 I showed you the resting place of my paternal grandmother's grandmother on her father's side (stick with me!). Today, I will show you the resting place of my paternal grandmother's grandmother on her mother's side. I think. Phew!

Annie Faull died in Drummoyne in Sydney in 1929 and is buried in Rookwood Cemetery. Being folk of mean means, her grave is without a marker, but is mapped. I guess it does have a marker of a kind. She rests beneath that fulsome palm in the second photograph.

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Welcome to the sixth week of Taphophile Tragics. The meme is receivinbg 23 contributions per week. They are detailed and quite diverse. And fascinating to read! I monitor the links daily, all week, and am managing to visit everyone who posts. I appreciate your contribution and the effort put into researching.

Please link directly to your post, rather than simply to your blog in general. Mr Linky opens at 10pm Monday, Sydney time (GMT+11). When you can, please visit the contributing bloggers to show your appreciation of their endeavours.

Taphophile Tragics # 5

2012-01-23T22:00:00.006+11:00

Libraries have the Dewey Decimal System. The cataloguing of the departed is more libertarian.

In Rookwood Necropolis, the main cemetery in Sydney, there are over a million departed souls, in an area of about 300 hectares. What you see in the first photograph is a snapshot of the Locater of Rookwood Departed Souls. The second photograph shows that in Pere LaChaise, in Paris, they have a more 'romantic' approach to locating resting places.

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Welcome to the fifth week of Taphophile Tragics. Please link directly to your post, rather than simply to your blog in general. Mr Linky opens at 10pm Monday, Sydney time (GMT+11). I monitor the links daily, and am managing to visit everyone who posts. I appreciate your most diverse contributions.

When you can, please visit the contributing bloggers to show your appreciation of their endeavours.

Taphophile Tragics # 4

2012-01-16T22:00:00.007+11:00

Carolyn, our Tragic from Oakland, last week, introduced the term 'columbarium'. Here is a view from inside the Botany Columbarium, in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. Botany has mausoluems, graves, lawn cemetery sections, cremation walls, and cremation gardens. Inside a columbarium can be quite stuffy. ~~Letty, our Tragic from Ararat~~ Grace, our Tragic from Perth, likened them to a 'library' of the dead, which is so spot on. However, the positive is that you learn a bit about the departed because small items are left within the 'shelf'. With any sort of luck they will not be weathered, vandalised, or stolen.

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Welcome to the fourth week of Taphophile Tragics. You will be familiar with the posting methodology, which I have detailed in a drop-down beneath the blog title. Mr Linky opens at 10pm Monday, Sydney time (GMT+11), and, hopefully, will close at 10pm Friday.

Please visit the contributing bloggers to show your appreciation of their endeavours.

Taphophile Tragics # 3

2012-01-09T22:00:00.003+11:00

Bleak and sorrowful, or beautiful and uplifting? When it comes to cemeteries, it is not all in the eye of the beholder.

Layout, landscaping, and plantings all play a role. In Montparnesse Cemetery in Paris, these wreaths convey the love and respect in which the departed was held by the many mourners at her graveside in April 2011. Parisian cemeteries swathe their departed in living flowers.

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Welcome to the third week of Taphophile Tragics. You will be familiar with the posting methodology, which I have detailed in a drop-down beneath the blog title. Mr Linky opens at 10pm Monday, Sydney time (GMT+11), and, hopefully, will close at 10pm Friday.

Please visit the contributing bloggers to show your appreciation of their endeavours.

Taphophile Tragics # 2

2012-01-02T22:00:00.000+11:00

With five cousins, I travelled to Jamieson, Victoria, to locate the resting place of my great-great-grandparents, Stephen Cole (1890) and Hannah Wilkins Cole (1878). Being a family of meagre means, I did not expect grave markers. Stephen's Death Certificate stated that he was laid to rest in Plot 6 of the Jamieson Cemetery. Hannah's certificate was silent on the subject.

Whilst chatting at the Historical Society, I unearthed that the original town cemetery was involved in a surveying mix-up with the State School and, whilst all markers were moved to the new cemetery, all deceased were left in the ground. That portion of the original cemetery that was not resurveyed to the school, is now an arboretum. So I give you a photograph of a glorious aroretum in the 'high country' wherein rests my great-great-grand-mother, Hannah Wilkins Cole (1820-1878).

Lux eterna, pax eterna.

Welcome to the second week of Taphophile Tragics. You will be familiar with the posting methodology, which I have detailed in a drop-down beneath the blog title. Mr Linky opens at 10pm Monday, Sydney time (GMT+11), and will close at 10pm Friday, if I can work out how to turn it off!

Please visit as many contribututing bloggers as you can make time for.

No need to leave a comment here. I would much prefer you to visit a contributing blogger and show your appreciation of their endeavours!

Taphophile Tragics #1

2011-12-26T20:03:00.007+11:00

Kangaroos play an invaluable role in the Wauchope General Cemetery, NSW, Australia

Welcome to the first week of Taphophile Tragics. You will be familiar with the posting methodology, which can be found in a drop-down beneath the blog title. Mr Linky opened at 10pm Monday, Sydney time (GMT+11), and will close at 10pm Friday.

Please visit as many contributions as you can make time for.

No need to leave a comment. I would much prefer you to visit a contributing blogger and leave a comment there!

Taphophile Tragics # 1 - Commencing Tuesday 27 December

2011-12-25T09:00:00.015+11:00

The photograph above shows a very small part of Rookwood Cemetery which is the largest cemetery in Sydney.

Welcome to Taphophile Tragics.

As the side-bar explains, a taphophile is someone entranced, addicted even, to wandering through cemeteries and graveyards.

I envisage this meme as a historical/landscape look at cemeteries the world over. I do not envisage the meme to stretch to accommodate ghosts, the after-life, or astrological phenomena.

Do not feel restricted to a cemetery around where you live, however, please identify the cemetery, and tell us something that you liked and why. For mine, the text is as important as the image.

I think it essential that the photographs that you use, are ones that you have taken yourself and therefore are able to vouch for the copyright permission-to-use.

The 'Mr Linky' for Taphophile Tragics will be activated at 10pm Monday night, Sydney time, which is GMT +11 during summer. It will stay active until 10pm Friday Sydney time.

Create your Taphophile Tragics post to begin with. Then, come here and enter your name and the link to your post in the spaces provided. Please do not enter Mr Linky until your post is published on your own blog. Be sure that your link goes directly to your Taphophile Tragics post.

Add a link to this blog in your post, to enable others to join if they wish. It helps if you then visit the posts of other Taphophiles. If you visit them, and leave a comment, they'll know you've visited and may visit you in return. By the way, no need to comment here, at the weekly Linky post. I would much prefer you enter your own post's link, and then go read, and comment on, other contributions.

We are all tragics, so let's pull together!