> My parents are ravenous genealogists. Our ancestry is primarily English, so when we lived in the suburbs of London between 1983 and 1985, they took advantage of the opportunity by spending many weekends in the libraries there and by roaming cemeteries and cathedrals to look at ancestral graves.
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Are your parents interested in the English genealogy of your immediate family... or is this a generalized interest?

I recall the great fervor generated by the BBC report that a Somerset schoolteacher, Adrian Targett, was determined by a 99% genetic mDNA matchup to be a mitochondrial descendant -- on his mother's side -- of a 9000-year-old male ancestor found in Cheddar Gorge (the oldest complete skeleton found in Britain). The question the newspapers humourously posed to the public was, "How far back can you trace YOUR family tree?"

Well, my pure-Canadian part of the family has been living in Quebec for at least nine generations.


> Yesterday we just walked the newer section of the cemetery. This afternoon I'd like to walk the older one again. Maybe I'll be able to find a stone even older than 1812.
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I think the oldest legible grave marker that I've seen in local cemetaries is from around that time... 1812 or 1808, I believe. The markers that last tend to be of an extremely hard red granite. Many of them are inset flat into the ground over the head of the body, where the stone marker might eventually get buried by encroaching vegetation.

This can cause unexpected problems, years later. For example, long ago, one of my in-laws' friends once owned a house on some farmland -- and they describe having local constructors come in and dig an extension through a bare-earth root cellar. The men kept uncovering these really annoying bits of animal bones and stuff... until they suddenly hit a grave marker and it dawned that these 'bones' might actually be something else, and that they *didn't* want to know more (I don't think *I'd* want to know more, either.) Reportedly one of the workers yelled up to his wife, "Uh... Dearest! We're stopping digging NOW and putting down the subfloor RIGHT HERE!!"