Outing at the Salt Lake City Cemetery

For FHE, Jeff and I went to the Salt Lake City Cemetery to find my Bradford relatives' gravestones. This was our second attempt at the task; our first outing was cut short by mountain standard time and by our tardiness (sorry Drew and Jess--the food afterward was great!)

I recall visiting the cemetery with my Carlson relatives in the late eighties before my grandpa died. I remember the place well, and explained it very simply to Jeff, "It's on a hill and there were lots of trees around." You'll notice that I was correct (observe the slight slope and the bush in the background), but we learned that this description could well be true of all 140,000 graves at the cemetery. It took a call to the cemetery office and two maps to locate the graves.

Being the resourceful person I am, I tidied up the graves with an ice scraper and had Jeff document the occassion. Since I'm not an expert on my family history (only on Jeff's family history), we took pictures of all the graves with matching surnames in the vicinity, just to be sure.

Above is the grave of my great grandparents, Rose and Hial Bradford.

After our family history jaunt, we decided to find some graves of famous people. We had no idea where to locate said graves, so we drove around and looked for all of the big markers figuring they must be someone of importance. It worked!! We saw the Hinkley family marker and the graves of David O. McKay, John Taylor, Heber J. Grant, J. Golden Kimball, and Joseph Fielding Smith to name a few. We also learned after awhile that many of the pioneer graves have a little square gold plaque that glitters in the setting sun. This further helped us in our quest.