Today, 23 January 2023, the 4,000th person with some claim to fame was published on the website. For almost all of them a picture of the last resting place is available on the site. It took almost 28 years to get there since 1995. There is a lot of material that has yet to be published and the photo collection is still growing. Let's see how far we can get in the next years!

The recreation of all pictures on the site has been completed earlier this year. Most of the very small reproductions of the photographs that were placed on this site since 1995 have been replaced by larger ones. And the site will keep growing, there's years of material to be processed...

I have to admit that this Blog was neglected a bit during the last few years. For now just a short note to let you know that most pictures on the site are being replaced by larger ones. The early pages of the site are almost 30 years old and nowadays our devices have much higher resolutions than in those days. Since the site has become quite large this is a project that has started last September and is expected to continue until next summer. But no worries, new pages will be added just the same as you can see in the Recent Additions in the upper right area of the homepage.

Christina Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal

In December 1993 I visited Highgate Cemetery in London for the first time. The Western part of the Cemetery was only accessible with a guided tour and still is. It was raining and I asked for the Rossetti grave but I was told that it was too dangerous too visit the grave because that part of the cemetery was overgrown and slippery when raining. 

It took over 22 years before another visit to the Western part of the cemetery was planned. When I asked for the Rossetti grave, our very friendly guide Jenny immediately offered to take the two of us to the grave after the tour. So she did and after all those years I was finally able to add pictures of the grave to the pages on Christina Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal. 

The Cemetery was less overgrown than in 1993 and during the last twenty years they did a wonderful job in protecting the tombs from further decay.

Una Troubridge

After many years of unclarity about her grave location, we finally managed to find Lady Una Troubridge's grave in Rome, Italy. Soon to be published on the site.

The mystery of Romaine Brooks is finally solved

Many years ago I took pictures of the tombs of the very interesting intellectual lesbians Renée Vivien and Nathalie Barney at the Passy Cemetery in Paris (actually, this was in 1999). I was wondering where another member of that circle, Romaine Brooks, was buried. At a certain moment it was stated on the Find-a-Grave site that she was also on Passy. I doubted that and contacted the author. He admitted that he had doubts himself. Many sites copied the information from each other and it is widely stated on the web now that Romaine was buried on Passy. But she wasn't.

I read Diane Souhami's biography "Wild Girls", which tells the story of Nathalie and Romaine. It was published in 2004 and there was indeed new information on the grave of Romaine: it was to be at the Trabuquet Cemetery in Menton.

In 2008 my fellow grave collector and I visited Nice (for the first time ever) and from there we took the train to Menton to find Romaine's grave. First we went to the Vieux-Château cemetery where Aubrey Beardsley was supposed to be buried (the source for this was the book by Bertrand Beyern). We inspected all the graves but no Beardsley. A slight disappointment, but we moved uphill to the Trabuquet cemetery. This was very large, but there was an English section near the entrance and we had good hopes to find Romaine there. To our surprise we found the grave of Aubrey Beardsley instead. Beyern is usually very accurate, but this time the wrong cemetery had been listed. We inspected all the graves but no Romaine. Now we had a problem, because the cemetery was too large to inspect all the stones and there was no office where we could ask for information. We had a good try but we found nothing and went back to Nice.

That was a disappoinment, because we had no further information and we probably wouldn't be back in Nice or Menton in the next few years. Back home I decided to try if I could contact Diane Souhami . Maybe she had more information and perhaps she had seen the grave herself. I managed to contact her and she kindly answered me that she didn´t remember her source and unfortunately she had no access to her archive. She hadn´t seen the grave herself. I thanked her but the search seemed to be at a dead end now.

But then during a visit to New York in 2010 and some book browsing at the famous Strand Book Store we suddenly touched upon an older book about Romaine Books. Fortunately it was written after her death and there was new information on one of the last pages of the book. Romaine was buried at the English Cemetery in Nice. We had never heard of an English Cemetery in Nice, but home again, we found out that there was indeed an old English cemetery not far from Nice airport that was now part of a slightly larger cemetery and close to a very large cemetery. Probably the information that she was buried in an English cemetery was passed on to Diana Souhami or her source and not knowing of an English cemetery in Nice it was assumed that the grave must have been in Menton. We also read that this old English cemetery in Nice might be demolished during the next few years.

It always takes a while before you can visit a city in a foreign country just to look for one single gravesite because life has many other demands, but Genoa was also on the wish list as well (Constance Lloyd alias Mrs. Oscar Wilde is resting there) and early in March we took the train from Genoa to Nice and the next morning a nice long sunny walk took us from the city center to the English Cemetery. We found the cemetery easily enough and started inspecting all the tombs in the English section. When we were almost finished a slight fear arose that Romaine would escape again, but finally there was the stone of Henry St Mar Goddard. We knew of course that he was the brother she hated and that she was buried beside him anyway after her own death many years later. And there was a stone plate with golden letters that were difficult to read, `Here are the remains of Romaine who remains Romaine´.

Mystery solved. Her tomb will appear on this site soon, but I wonder how many years it will take before most other sites have corrected their erroneous information that Romaine is on Passy.

Vernon Lee and the supernatural

It must have been around 1990 that I picked up a second hand copy of a 1976 re-edition of The Supernatural Omnibus by Montague Summers. In that volume he included two stories by Vernon Lee: Amour Dure and Oke of Okehurst. In his introduction he praised her work highly as stated his disappointment that she had given us no more ghost stories after 1890. I loved the two stories but it was many years later before I realized that Vernon Lee was still alive at the time Summers wrote his introduction.

Sometime in 2008 or 2009 I found out that Montague Summers' grave still existed in Richmond near London. In 2009 I visited his grave that had been nameless until a small stone with his name was erected in 1988. It can be seen on the page dedicated to Summers on this site. Earlier this year I visited Florence for the first time in my life and I finally had the chance to search for the grave containing the ashes of Vernon Lee. I didn't exactly know where to look but it was found quicker than expected. I haven't read any other story by Vernon Lee during the last twenty years. I guess it's about time to look for further supernatural fiction by her hand. :-)

Southampton, Bournemouth and Portsmouth

Another little little trip was completed last Monday. I visited Southampton, Bournemouth and Portsmouth. In Southampton the grave of Edward Sothern was easily found. He was the original Lord Dundreary in Our American Cousin, a play performed by the cast of Laura Keene in the USA. Sothern played the part over and over again and at a certain moment he even bought the copyrights. In Bournemouth Mary Shelley's tomb was the main attraction. Just within a year I collected Byron, Shelley and Mary! In Portsmouth Charles Dickens was born and the grave of mistress Ellen Ternan was shown us by a kind gentleman at the cemetery who was to host a Dickens grave walk later that afternoon.

There was even time to travel to Minstead, not far from Southampton in New Forest. There, at the quiet All Saints' Churchyard the simple grave of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is located. His remains were transferred there in 1955 and he was buried in a corner of the cemetery since he was a spiritualist, not a Christian. Naturally, all these tombs will appear on the site over time.

A little bit longer in... New York City

Yesterday I returned from New York City. This in itself is not so special, but I should have returned eight days ago. Those damn volcanic ashes! However, I'll spare you the details since you can hear stories about stranded travellers anywhere now. ;-)
More important is that I managed to look up some interesting graves in the New York areas, among them the legendary actor and playwright Dion Boucicault, author Carson MacCullers (whose "The Member of the Wedding" impressed me much when I was young), singer Geraldine Farrar and, in Philadelphia, scientist/statesman Benjamin Franklin.
After processing the pictures these and more will appear on the site. But things might go slowly, catching up on work must have first priority now!

The grave of Shelley

I think I've known for about twenty years where the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was buried. During that time I've collected nearly 70 biographies about him, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and further illustrious people from their circle like Edward John Trelawny, Claire Clairmont, Augusta Leigh and Leigh Hunt (mind you, 70 is still nothing, since thousands of books have been written about them).

Well, on January 23th I finally stood in front of the place where Shelley's ashes were buried after he drowned in a storm and his remains were cremated on the Italian shore, leaving Mary a widow of only 24 years old.

And where Shelley is, are Keats and Trelawny. John Keats died in Rome of tuberculosis aged 25 and Edward John Trelawny bought the grave next to Shelley and was buried there in 1881, 59 years after Shelley's death. An entry on Keats and pictures of all the gravesites will shortly appear on the site. Visits to the Campo Verano and Santo Teutonico cemeteries have also provided a lot of new material, but most of that will probably have to wait for later.

Cemetery hospitality in Lyon

Today I was kindly criticised by a friend for not updating this blog. Actually, I thought that nobody read it at all, but at least there's one exception. So here we go, a little story about French hospitality for Christmas.
I always thought that the French prohibition to take photographs on cemeteries was invented to have a means of sending people away who disturb mourners or others who are visiting gravesites of relatives. Even at Père Lachaise it's officially forbidden to take any pictures, but of course Paris is positioning this cemetery as a tourist attraction.
Well, I was wrong. Last November in Lyon we entered the Cimetière de la Croix-Rousse and as soon as we wanted to make a photograph from the tomb of Louis-Hilaire Carrand, a person of the cemetery office came down to us and asked if we had a permission to take photographs. We hadn't and asked how we could obtain this permission. One needed a written permission from the city of Lyon (not to be obtained at the cemetery) as well as from the family of the tomb one wanted to take a photograph of. This was also the case for old tombs, like that of Carrand, who died in 1899. So in fact it's close to impossible to take pictures of a number of historical tombs in Lyon, unless one does it secretly.
We showed our detailed printed lists of grave locations for this and other cemeteries to show that we were doing serious research, but this didn't help us. Rules were rules and there were clearly no exceptions to be made.
We understand that families visiting their dear ones shouldn't be disturbed, but we don't entirely understand the city of Lyon. From a cultural and historical perspective we feel there's some case to be made for being allowed to show tombs on this website. On the other hand it's their right to refuse us to add the Cimetière de la Croix-Rousse to our ever growing list. Fortunately nobody objected when we took many pictures at the Loyasse Cimetière in the same city two years earlier and also at the Guillotière Nouveau cemetery we experienced no problems. We still like Lyon (and especially its bar the Pecherie :-)) a lot, but this was a little disappointment.

Prosper Mérimée makes 1000

Today I added the 1000th person to the site: Prosper Mérimée. I visited his grave in Cannes last December. I was told that even during the winter the weather was usually quite nice at the Côte d'Azur, but that day it was raining so heavily that we had to hide under trees and stone stairs several times before we could continue our search for his grave. It was easily found and pictures could be taken before the rain started pouring again.

Washington Irving

There has been a text only item on Washington Irving on the site for years, but today I was finally able to add a picture of his grave. Yesterday I returned from New York and from there I travelled 40 miles north to Tarrytown where Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is located. Allthough there wasn't time to visit many cemeteries, some other New York graves will appear shortly.

Richard Tauber

Yesterday I received an e-mail from a visitor named Dominique, who suggested an entry on Richard Tauber. I happened to stumble upon a tombstone bearing his name when I visited Bad Ischl in Austria back in 2003. This was slightly confusing, because I thought he was buried at Brompton Cemetery in London. But Tauber had lived in Bad Ischl and I wondered if his remains were moved to Austria or if there had been plans to do so. But apparantely his name is only mentioned on the tombstone of his nephew Max Tauber. In 2004 I was in London and I looked up Richard's real grave at Brompton Cemetery. Both are now on the site.

Lyon and Geneva

Earlier this month I visited Lyon (France) and inspected the Loyasse cemetery. I went there before in 2001, but this time I was much better prepared to locate the tombs of the most interesting people buried there. I also went to Geneva and Lausanne (Switzerland). It was exiting to see the Villa Deodati with my own eyes. It was there in 1816 that Lord Byron entertained Shelley and his future wife Mary and the latter first thought of writing Frankenstein.
I hope I will be able to put some of the material on the site soon, but it always seems to take more time than one hopes for...

Finally a blog

After planning to do so for a long, long, long time, I finally set up this blog for The Androom Archives. Readers of the website frequently ask questions or tell stories related to the contents of the website (using the send mail option). With this blog I hope to share some information that may be of interest to other users.