A Grave Situation

Working full-time and bringing up a family doesn't leave me with much time to indulge in my love of family history. I figure I will be able to research 'til my hearts content in the years to come when the children have left home.
But for now, I grab the moments when I can.

On the weekend, my eldest stepson had a soccer game in Camden. We had to be there an hour early so the boys have time to warm-up together.
Normally my husband & I use this time to find a lovely cafe to indulge our other passion - coffee and banana bread with my youngest stepson.

This weekend though, I claimed as family history time.

St John's Anglican Church in Camden is home to many of my ancestors.

We spent a lovely hour roaming around the old headstones searching for family names.

I came away with about 20 photographs and a few new leads.

I faced the usual problems of the modern family historian during my visit.

Firstly, the church was very firmly and definitely closed to the public. So browsing inside was not an option.

Secondly, many of the headstones and graves were suffering from neglect and weathering.

Broken plaques, headstones falling over and graves starting to cave in. Many of the graves had lost their headstones completely.

So although I found a lot of family names, I didn't find the couple of headstones I really wanted to find.

However our visit was too brief.

There was no time to visit St Paul's and no time to drive by Camden Park House - the home of John and Elizabeth Macarthur (it's only open for viewing on the second last weekend of September as it is still privately owned by the Macarthur family).

We saw the signs for Macarthur Park and Cobbity as we drove past...and promised ourselves another visit soon to the beautiful Camden cowpastures!

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