In over 30 years of being involved with Rosewood Cemetery, like all of us, I have experience death of family and friends. Rosewood has become the eternal home for many of our families. Why do we visit cemeteries? We visit to reflect, spend quiet time in prayer, and recall memories of those gone. We visit to remember! To remember our loved ones’ presence, their service, their life. I read recently, “death is not the end, being forgotten is!”
We place family stones and in-ground foot/head stones in memorialization of our loved ones. All these memorials have one thing in common — the dash! Between birth date and death date, the dash represents a lifetime. Regardless of the length. It can be but a day, or over 100 years. As writer Sherry Riter said, the dash shouts, “I lived here! Don’t forget me!”
We have all probably heard the country song by Branch and Dean, “The Dash” about the loss of a son. A most popular poem entitled The Dash by Linda Ellis. She tells us, “…the dash represents all the time, all the years spent living…” Obituaries are written and published announcing the passing of someone--telling about family connections, how that person spent their dash, and other snippets of their life.
From our new website, you can do a search for family or friends buried in the cemetery, and find their location. You will see a location bubble indicating position in cemetery. Click on it, and you can see a small amount of public information on each deceased. Our software manufacturer, Grave Discover, also allows Rosewood staff to upload obituaries, or other short biographic information. Once upload, this, too, is available on the public site on the individual location bubble.
Currently, there are over 4,200 individuals buried in Rosewood. This will be a monumental task, but in my estimation, possible over time. Rosewood will celebrate 100 years of service to the community in 2025 and this could be a goal. Within the last 5-7 years, funeral homes have allowed online access to obituaries for families they help with the service. Newspapers are another source. If a family member could send us via email, a digital copy of loved ones’ obituaries, we can begin the process of uploading to the public site.
Should you wish to be involved, you can use the short contact form on the website to send the email. Just add the obituary as an attachment. It should be in PDF form. There are security issues with our database, and not all PDFs can get directly uploaded to our servers. I have found taking an obituary directly from the funeral home’s website, even a PDF, must be printed first, scanned into a local PDF document, then it can be uploaded and accepted by Grave Discover.
We are calling this Rosewood Project Dash.
Let’s see what we can accomplish together!
Any questions, just send an email to rosewoodcemeterywv@gmail.com or click the button below to contact us.
Built and Powered By
