My first visit to the cemetery was a sad event, since it was my grandmother’s funeral, but it was also life-changing in another way – it opened my eyes to a cemetery as a place of family history. There is nothing quite like looking upon a grave stone an seeing a name – your own name – and knowing that name, there, speaks to your own beginnings.

It’s a small plot to house so many family members, but we reuse burial plots. After a few years – seven, I was told, is the permitted window – the remains have decayed to the point where there’s very little left. Certainly that makes grave-digging a very different experience to places where plots will only ever hold the remains of one person.

When I first visited the plot in 1982 it contained the remains of six people in four plots – my great-grandparents, two of their sons, and one of their daughters-in-law. My grandmother made it two daughters-in-law, and my grandfather soon made it three sons. The plot to the left of this picture held their fourth son and his son. The one to the left held their daughter, son-in-law, and another grandson. Behind the photographer were more family plots – another daughter and son-in-law, while further beyond this plot lay another daughter, her husband, and another daughter-in-law. In the decades since, many more family members have joined them.

When first arrived here, I wasn’t aware of any of that (and many of these graves I only discovered in subsequent years, often at later family funerals). I had seen the cemetery before – in fact, a cousin of my father’s live quite nearby – but I had no idea that there was such a place where the family name(s) stood literally carved in stone.