Most viewed photos

The internet is a strange place. People come looking for all sorts of things, and occasionally they stumble on my blog and photographs. About once a week I check on the stats for the blog to see what brings people here, and I probably look at my Flickr stats about once a month to see what photos are getting the most views.

For reasons that I have yet to fathom, my most viewed photo on Flickr is a fairly grainy shot of my grandfather’s hunting themed birthday cake that probably predates my birth. But what I wanted to look at today was my most viewed cemetery photos.

The most viewed cemetery photo of all (4th most viewed of all photos) is one from the Nurse family cemetery at the Rebecca Nurse homestead in Danvers, Massachusetts. It lists the names of the people who testified on Rebecca Nurse’s behalf during the Salem Witch Trials.

This makes a lot of sense to me, as the Salem Witch trials elicit a lot of interest even today. My 4th most viewed cemetery photo is the stone cenotaph for Rebecca Nurse at the Salem Witch Trials Memorial.

Number two is my rather poor photo of the stone for Helen Pitts Douglass from Rochester, New York. I’m guessing it gets the hits it does because Frederick Douglass, her husband, is mentioned in the description.

The third and fifth most viewed cemetery photos are for Confederate general’s graves in the same town: Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

These photos, poor as many of them are, have received well over 100 views each. I’m going to revisit this again, because I am curious about what photos of mine that aren’t of famous people’s graves get visitors.

Read Full Post »

A day late…

Yesterday marked the 90th anniversary of Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing women’s right to vote in the United States.

A likely grave marker for today’s post would be for Susan B. Anthony, one of the most prominent leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, but I’ve written about her before. Instead I want to introduce you to someone whose contributions to women’s suffrage are less well known, even for those who know his name: Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass rests in the same cemetery as Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, New York. Born into slavery in about 1818, Douglass engineered an escape and freed himself by fleeing northward. He married his first wife and settled in Massachusetts. His self-education brought him in contact with abolitionists, and he began to speak about his experiences as a slave and joined the abolitionists’ number. He wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself. He received acclaim as an orator and writer.

Although Douglass is best known for his role as an abolitionist and proponent of black civil rights, he had a much broader perspective on social reform. He supported equal rights for all, including immigrants, Native Americans, and women. He gave speeches in support of the home rule movement in Ireland. And, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, he supported women’s suffrage. In 1848, Douglass was the only African-American in attendance at the first women’s rights convention in the nation, in Seneca Falls, New York. He wrote and spoke in favor of women’s suffrage, not as a separate issue from black civil rights, but as one piece of the whole of social justice. He argued that with the franchise, African-American women in particular would be given a new tool to continue the struggle for equality. He died in 1895, still engaged in his social justice work.

Douglass is represented in these statues at Seneca Fall’s National Women’s Rights Historic Park. (Sorry for the blurriness – look at the third figure from the right.)

Read Full Post »