Finding the Graves of Special People

A very interesting website is Find A Grave, or findagrave.com. You can search thousands of cemeteries for the graves of famous people and see photos of their final resting places, as well as facts about their lives. You can find the grave of Abraham Lincoln for instance, or that of your favorite old time actor or actress, or your favorite author, like John Steinbeck (his ashes are interred in Salinas Cemetery in Salinas, California). It sounds morbid, but it isn't. It allows you to know more about the person as well as his final destination.

If you are interested in the 40 souls who perished on United Flight 93, for example, you can go to this findagrave link, which contains 38 obituaries of the passengers and crew. The film depicts them as ordinary people, and they were. Go to the link I just gave you and see what they actually looked like, what they did for work, where they were going that fatal day of September 11, 2001.

An example is lovely Honor Wainio, who was 27 years old. She died on Flight 93 while on a business trip. I went through all 38 obituaries so I could know something about all of them. (The site says there are 39 but there is one duplication.) Knowing what their names were, what they looked like, and what they had accomplished was important to me. I don't want them to be just nameless and faceless statistics. They were people who deserve to be remembered. I wanted to acknowledge their humanity, to look into each of their faces, to pray for each and every one.

Want to know if a certain famous person is still alive or dead? You can find out by going to Dead People Server and searching for their name. You will learn whether they are alive or dead, and if the latter, the date of their death and the cause. Links are provided to their obituary, their film credits if applicable, and to Find A Grave. Whatever happened to John Forsythe, the actor in "Dynasty"? (He's still alive and in his 80's.)

As a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans, I have spent a lot of time in cemeteries looking for graves and tombstones of Civil War veterans. We repair old grave sites, get tombstones for unmarked graves, identify long forgotten brothers who have gone before. In the process, we learn that history is more than dates and facts in sterile text books, but is in fact the lives of many ordinary men and women, some of who did extraordinary things.