Any Better/Written in Stone

Any Better...........than this!


A new cousin a day keeps the boredom away. Genealogists: People helping people.....that's what it's all about!

Genealogy: a search for the greatest treasures, our ancestors.

Genealogy: Better than the best adventure game and just as frustrating.

Genealogy: it's all relative in the end, anyway.

Genealogy is great when you score!

Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.

May all your family trees branch toward the stars!

May you ask the right question of the right person at the right time.

May your family tree grow happy branches!

Share your knowledge, it is a way to achieve immortality.

Sharing genealogy is a rewarding experience!

When you search for ancestors, you find great friends!

Take time to understand and lend a gentle, helping hand.

Life, liberty and the right to know who your ancestors are.

Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.

Search out the past... know yourself... look to the future.

Written in Stone


On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:
Here lies Ezekial Aikle
Age 102
The Good Die Young.

In a London, England cemetery:
Ann Mann
Here lies Ann Mann,
Who lived an old maid
But died an old Mann.
Dec. 8, 1767

In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery:
Anna Wallace
The children of Israel wanted bread
And the Lord sent them manna,
Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil sent him Anna.

Playing with names in a Ruidoso, New Mexico, cemetery:
Here lies Johnny Yeast
Pardon me
For not rising.

Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery:
Here lies the body of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas Instead of the brake.

In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery:
Here lays Butch,
We planted him raw.
He was quick on the trigger,
But slow on the draw.

A widow wrote this epitaph in a Vermont cemetery:
Sacred to the memory of
my husband John Barnes
who died January 3, 1803
His comely young widow, aged 23, has
many qualifications of a good wife, and
yearns to be comforted.
( guess they did not have personal ads then)

A lawyer's epitaph in England:
Sir John Strange
Here lies an honest lawyer,
And that is Strange.

Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont:
I was somebody.
Who, is no business
Of yours.

Lester Moore was a Wells, Fargo Co. station agent for Naco, Arizona in the cowboy days of the 1880's. He's buried in the Boot Hill Cemetery in   Tombstone, Arizona:
Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a .44
No Les No More.

In a Georgia cemetery: I told you I was sick!"

John Penny's epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:
Reader if cash thou art In want of any Dig 4 feet deep
And thou wilt find a Penny.

On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia: She always said her feet were killing her but nobody believed her.

In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:
On the 22nd of June
Jonathan Fiddle -
Went out of tune.

Anna Hopewell's grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont has an epitaph that sounds like something from a Three Stooges movie:
Here lies the body of our Anna Done to death by a banana It wasn't the fruit that laid her low But the skin of the thing that made her go.

More fun with names with Owen Moore in Battersea, London, England:
Gone away
Owin' more
Than he could pay.

  • Someone in Winslow, Maine didn't like Mr. Wood:
    In Memory of Beza Wood
    Departed this life
    Nov. 2, 1837
    Aged 45 yrs.
    Here lies one Wood
    Enclosed in wood
    One Wood
    Within another.
    The outer wood
    Is very good:
    We cannot praise
    The other.
  • On a grave from the 1880's in Nantucket, Massachusetts:
    Under the sod and under the trees
    Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.
    He is not here, there's only the pod:
    Pease shelled out and went to God.
  • The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania is almost a consumer tip:
    Who was fatally burned
    March 21, 1870
    by the explosion of a lamp
    filled with "R.E. Danforth's
    Non-Explosive Burning Fluid"
  • Oops! Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York:
    Born 1903--Died 1942
    Looked up the elevator shaft to see if
    the car was on the way down. It was.
  • In a Thurmont, Maryland, cemetery:
    Here lies an Atheist
    All dressed up
    And no place to go.
  • In a cemetery in England:
    Remember man, as you walk by,
    As you are now, so once was I,
    As I am now, so shall you be,
    Remember this and follow me.
  • To which someone replied by writing on the tombstone:
    To follow you I'll not consent,
    Until I know which way you went.
  • But does he make house calls?
    Dr. Fred Roberts, Brookland, Arkansas:
    Office upstairs