The Graves of My Ancestors

I’ve been wondering . . . why is it important to find the tombstone of an ancestor?

Take my great great grandfather, Thomas Scott, for instance. He was born April 14, 1795 to James and Elizabeth Scott in Hawick, Roxburghshire, Scotland. On April 6, 1816, he and Janet Notman gave out their names in church to be married. He was 21 years old and she was three or four years older. Their first child, Ann, was born in September 1817, followed by six more children, the last one born 1834. During all this time, Thomas was working as a hind at the Spittal at Bedrule. Sometime between 1834 and 1841, the family moved to Jedburgh, six or eight miles north of Spittal. Thomas continued to work as an agricultural laborer, and some of the older children were either married or working away from home. By 1851, Thomas, now in his fifties, had evidently saved enough money to get a cart and horse and had set himself up as a ‘carrier’. He had moved to Lilliesleaf village, but probably spent most of his time on the roads between Hawick and Jedburgh, whether delivering supplies to individuals or freighting for larger companies I don’t know. I do know that he must have earned enough to set up a grocery store of his own in Lilliesleaf. Unfortunately, his wife, Janet, died in 1853 just when they were finally becoming independent. By the time Thomas was 76, in 1871, he was boarding with his oldest daughter, Ann, and her husband, William Robson, in Bedrule Village. He died there June 11, 1873. He was 78 years old .

All these things I had found out through research in Old Parochial Registers, census records, a few letters written by his granddaughter. We discovered, at the Heritage Hub in Hawick, that Thomas Scott and his wife, Janet Notman, were buried in Lilliesleaf Kirkyard, so Edith, Jo, Robyn and I drove the narrow, winding roads to Lilliesleaf to find their graves. We divided the church yard up and began going up and down the aisles, hoping that the stone would still be there, and that it wouldn’t be so covered with moss and lichens that we couldn’t read it. We found it. It was in very good condition and the inscription was legible. There was even some information on the stone about the death of Janet Notman that we hadn’t known before.

So what was the most important thing I discovered in finding this tombstone? It didn’t give me any details of Thomas's life; it’s just a stone in a graveyard. I know that the spirits of our ancestors don’t spend their time hanging around the cemetery waiting for their descendants to visit. But that stone was a real, solid piece of evidence that Thomas Scott and Janet Notman had lived and worked and died; that someone had actually known them and put their names on this stone. They were real people and they were my ancestors, and I stood by their grave and honored them where others had stood to pay their respects more than a hundred years ago.