As many of you know, for the past year I
have been coordinating a project to catalogue our local cemetery. I’m delighted,
relieved, pleased to say that the year is almost over. This weekend I’m holding
a presentation to celebrate our achievements and, as I jot them down in
preparation for my speech, I’m proud to say that the outcomes far outstrip the
aims. In fact, had anyone suggested at the outset that we would get this much
work done, I would have been quite ‘negative’ with them.
We now have information boards at the
cemetery. These include plans of all the plots. There are row markers and small
plaques for every unmarked grave…
And more than that, we now have a website
with all the basic information that anyone might need to know about the
cemetery…
And much more than that, the website
contains a record for every burial with data about that person and search
facilities. It is now a fully functioning genealogical website…
And even more than that, the website
contains many researched stories about the lives led by a number of the people
buried there. This is why we called the project The Lives Behind the Stones.
We’ve managed to gather a fair cross-section showing contributions made to the
local community, to the city, in some cases to the country. There are contributions
to commerce, celebrations of scientific developments and, sadly, many moving stories
of refugees and evacuees who sought shelter here in Leicester.
I’m sorry you can’t all come to the
presentation but, if you’ve not looked at the website recently, you might like
to see the finished product and discover what I’ve been up to all year. You'll find it here.
