I went to the Logan cemetery the other day, to learn a little about some of the families that have chosen to be buried there. Why there? What was their family like? I dug a bit to find some of this information. Taking this "legend trip" to the Logan cemetery was an intersecting
experience for me. To be perfectly honest, I have always had a hard time
understanding why it is so common to find cemeteries next to schools. I find it
a little bit creepy; but don’t worry. Only a little bit. The Logan cemetery to
me has always just been the place that everyone goes in the fall to take
“selfies” or “roommate pictures” and post them on social media. Actually going
into the cemetery for my first time, and to go in with a purpose of finding out
about the peoples’ lives that are now there at the cemetery was actually a very
cool experience. I was able to look around and critically analyze a lot of
different grave markers of individuals; but I was most interested in how these
individuals were connected with the family members of whom were buried next toe
each other. I was able to look around and make my best guesses about the lives
of these people and how they came to be.
The first family I looked at was the Thatcher family. The first
thing that caught my eye was a giant statue of an angelic looking man holding a
book. I figured out that this man was there representing the whole family; it
wasn’t just one member’s grave marker. I thought that was interesting, and I wondered
what family member decided that would be a nice symbol for the family. At
approximately 15 feet tall, it is quite a bold symbol; as if the Thatcher’s are
making a statement such as “Hello, here we are!” it is quite a bold although
the death dates were different depending on the member, all of the family
members died within about the same time. Most of the death dates were from
1900-1980, and one from 1991. I found online that the Thatcher family moved
into Logan city around the same time I was founded, (1859,) so I wonder that if
after the 90’s the Thatcher’s have relocated, or if it is something more
serious like a family tradition that has stopped.
The Thatcher family. I loved the Sphere head stone.
The Nibly family was the second family I looked at. My first
thought upon walking up to this family’s grave marker was if this was the
family that founded the city Nibly, only a few miles south of Logan City. I
looked that up, and I found that Nibly City was in fact founded by Charles M.
Nibley, who seemed to be the head of this family. When you walk up to the grave
markers of this family, you see a larger monument looking stone in the middle
of the family area with Charles’s name on it. His headstone is a little to the
east of that, lined up with his three wives. Yes, Charles was a polygamist.
What I loved about this family, though, was that they had wooden panels placed
in the ground all around this family, to form a rectangle around them. I quite
liked that and wondered if the family planned that out; if they thought it
would be nice to, in a small way, become isolated from everyone else in the cemetery.
Charles and his wives were at the front of the rectangle, and as you keep
walking West, toward the end of the rectangle, the death dates start to vary.
As you walk west, the death dates are in the 70’s, then two from 1966 and 1980
in the next line, then, the next line is all very recent. The dates are from
1999-2013. However, at the very end of the rectangle, in the corner, there is
one death date that goes all the way back to 1956. So this family has a variety
of different death dates; some members must have decided to be buried there,
where others haven’t. The thing I found the most interesting was Charles’s big
monument; he must have thought he was pretty hot stuff.
Charles and all his wives. Oh, and let's not forget his own monument dedicated to himself there in the background.
We can gather a lot of information about families by simply
taking some time to analyze their grave markers and determining the ties that
they had or didn’t have with the city they are buried in. This can tell us a
lot about our own families as well; and we can understand better where our own families
came from.
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