Self-proclaimed thrill-seeker Helena Hunt was coming to the end of her tether in lockdown.
The 57-year-old council worker from Monmouthshire lives for life’s weird and wonderful quirks - but coronavirus put paid to many of her usual activities.
“I’m a very adventurous person,” she said, speaking from St Peter's Church cemetery at Llanwenarth Citra - one of the two cemeteries where she now spends a lot of time in Abergavenny.
“Before the first lockdown I spent much of my time rock climbing, mountain biking, paddle boarding, wild swimming. When all that was curtailed I ended up spending a lot of time walking my dogs and would walk past the cemeteries here.
“A couple of the graves caught my attention. One was a child and another was a lady called Mahala. I took some photos of the graves and went home and did some research - looking at newspaper cuttings in the national archives. It just started something.”
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Helena’s latest venture is probably her most weird and wonderful yet. She has now documented the lives of almost two full cemeteries worth of people who she believes deserve to be remembered properly through online memorials.
But that isn’t all she does. She’s managed to connect them too to their relatives and piece together family histories of people she never met in life. She’s had multiple people get in touch with her to personally thank her for her efforts in bringing together families across south east Wales.
Sat quietly beside a grave, it’s clear why she feels so connected to this place.
“I got married here,” she said, “but I’m not religious”. She looks up and points at a big old tree which she tells me is probably the oldest thing in the cemetery. “I spend a lot of time here with other walkers watching a lovely tawny owl in the tree. It’s a peaceful place.”
She has never been a historian, but it is striking how quickly she has learnt little facets of local history. It’s as though she knows each family connected to the headstones personally.
“There are 16 kids in this family,” she says as we pass a number of graves together. “They lived further up the road in the very big house we passed.”
She points to another grave. “This girl, lovely Levenia. She died at just three years old. Her mam had boiled a pan of spuds and the girl dropped the spuds over herself and died of the burns. You wouldn’t get that now would you? It just shows how different times were. Just awful. It was quite emotional when I found out because I’d wondered for a while what happened to her.”
Moving onto another grave, she added: “A young lad here was killed in World War One. He was on a ship that was torpedoed out of the water. The story made me cry. Some of them really strike you.”
She is keen to point out that you don’t need to be religious to feel peace in a graveyard. “I have no deep connection with the church. I love it here though - a genuinely lovely and peaceful place. I’m among people who have lived and have their own stories. Think of the times back then in the context of today - most of them made it through their troubles.
“We are surrounded by incredible people. A wealthy landowner just two feet away from the cleaner or the maid.
“This is our living history, it’s not a place of death. Death did not define anyone in this graveyard. Putting a life to those headstones has given me great stimulation. It’s nice now to walk through the cemeteries and have some sense of who these people were.”
Helena puts the pieces together via an app called Find A Grave - accessible all over the world allowing people to find their deceased relatives and friends. Once she confirms that they are buried in the cemetery through the app or burial records, she then trawls newspaper cuttings, baptismal records, and makes use of her subscriptions to ancestry websites to create memorials and link family trees - all completely free of charge.
She wants to share her story in the hope more volunteers like her will use their time “bringing these people back to life”.
“I’ve come across some amazing people, and it seems a real shame not enough is known about them,” she explained. “Beyond the notice in the press you don’t have anything to say their life mattered.”
Recently the Commonwealth War Graves Commission got in touch with her in an attempt to remember an ex-soldier and local man with a war memorial at the cemetery.
“He doesn’t have a headstone here but they contacted me because I’d connected him with his parents who are buried here, and I’ve created an online memorial for him,” Helena explained. “We’re going to have a proper memorial erected. They’re making applications for it now, hopefully as close as possible to his parents.”
There are many like the ex-soldier - buried within the cemetery but with no surviving visible reminder of their lives.
“There are 850 people known to be buried here but there are actually more than 2,500 people here,” she said. “I’ve found some hidden away. You can see how the ground dips, you get a rough guide of where they probably are.”
She tells a story of Molly Connolly, one of the few she knows are close by but who have evaded her.
“She had an off and on connection with a man who was ex-military,” Helena said. “From the records it seems she was a prostitute at the time of her death. She met a man in a pub and he walked her along the road here. He slit her throat.
“Whatever survival instinct kicked in she managed to drag herself as far as Brecon Road where she was found in the gutter on the roadside.
“His mam was in the ‘lunatic asylum’ as it was called back then. The reports in the papers are all about him being a ‘lunatic’ and about why it wasn’t his fault. This is how awfully mental health was described and understood at the time.
“Molly was second generation Irish too, so a lot was stacked against her - but he was actually sentenced to death by hanging in Usk prison.
“Because Molly was deemed a woman of ill repute at the time she had no Christian burial rights, so she was put in an unmarked grave and we have no accurate way of finding her.
“Reading about it all has really unsettled me. Given the time and place we know she’s highly unlikely to be anywhere but Abergavenny Cemetery. I’ve created an online memorial for her, but I’d love to see a physical memorial in Abergavenny - even if just a plaque.”
Others whose deaths often were not properly recognised with a headstone are those who took their own lives.
“It shows what people thought about suicides back then too. We’re only talking 100 years or so ago. Reading about people’s lives back then it is clear that mental health just wasn’t understood.
“There is a chap in the other cemetery - a military sergeant - who I’ve found took his own life near the Lamb and Flag [the pub near Llanwenarth Citra cemetery], and there is no headstone for him in Abergavenny - nothing. I’d really like to get him a pardon.
“Back then his wife and family would have had no rights to his pension at all. It’s just the injustice of it all that sticks with you.”
She has also been astonished to find how far people travelled more than 100 years ago.
She points to another headstone. “This chap is not from here, he is from Pathhead in Scotland,” she told. “He came down to Abergavenny and married one of the Delafield daughters. He went up on the train to see his mother in 1892 and died on the way.
“We have this image that transport wasn’t very good at the time when in fact many people were all over the place."
She comes across another grave and says: “That man came from Oxford. He was a brewster and he went on to own the Kings Arms Hotel, where he was fined for serving alcohol on a Sunday. Quite a character.
“That’s what is so enriching about it. Many of us have a fixed view of what life was like back then, but this graveyard tells us something different.”
In the long term she hopes interest in local genealogy will grow, and she likes the idea of a project bringing together living histories.
“We have fabulous buildings here and we are fantastic at commemorating things like that, but we’re not so good at remembering our living history,” she added.
“But all these people helped to build this place up to what it is now - down the pits, in the railway sheds, canals, on the land here. We’re blessed to live in such a lovely place.
“I think that’s the bit that we’re missing. I think it’s important we know a little bit more about those who lived and worked here. It would be great to bring them to life.”
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