Every life has a story to tell. We can’t all talk of major
achievements, life-saving inventions or headline-making discoveries, but we all
have our own unique story. Several years ago, when I set out to research the
‘lives behind the stones’ in the local Jewish cemetery, I was not looking for
the big names. I wanted to know about the lives of the ordinary people, people
like myself.
Regular visitors to this blog will remember me talking about
this Heritage Lottery funded project that I coordinated in 2014/15. We created a website
with information about Leicester's Jewish cemetery and a complete database of the graves
providing a genealogical search facility. The website is testament to my team’s
commitment and hard work and I am proud of what we created.
(Apologies if you’ve had trouble recently accessing the Jewish Gilroes project website. It has been undergoing routine maintenance but I have been reassured that it's fully functioning once more.)
(Apologies if you’ve had trouble recently accessing the Jewish Gilroes project website. It has been undergoing routine maintenance but I have been reassured that it's fully functioning once more.)
I do regret that
we only had time to research nineteen stories. We were not even able to recount
entire life stories, but mere snapshots of those nineteen lives. So much has
not been told and there are about a thousand graves in the cemetery, so there
are more than 900 lives yet, if ever, to reveal their stories. Maybe some were refugees from Eastern Europe in the early
1900s or descendants of refugees. Others may have come later in the 20th
century from Germany. They would possibly have been evacuated to Leicester
during the Blitz. They must have experienced so much that I will never know about
because now their lives have been lost behind the brief descriptions on their
headstones.
On the left is the headstone for the very first burial in the cemetery. It marks the grave of a young girl called Nina Rosina Berger who died aged 13. We could find very little about her short life but there was information to be uncovered regarding her family. A small group of us put together our findings and this is the story that I was able to write up for the website. Nina Rosina Berger.
Looking to the more distant past, apart from a few
exceptions, only the lives of Kings and Queens, their Chancellors and Priests
were recorded. I want to know what the ordinary people did. I want to know
about their daily lives, worries, joys, habits. If only they had been literate,
with their own blogs and Twitter accounts, think how much more we would know
about life in days gone by… or would we be bogged down with their daily
recounting of what they had for breakfast and what the weather was like?