Desparately Seeking Great Grandma

I reconnected with a long lost cousin after my dad's funeral. He told me that our great grandmother (my mother's paternal grandmother) was buried at Bukit Brown, a historically significant cemetery. Bukit Brown had fallen into disrepair before the turn of the century, but it returned to the national consciousness in the mid 2000s after part of it was earmarked for development. Many people were upset by the plans as Bukit Brown is a haven for birdlife, and also because many prominent Chinese from the colonial era were buried there.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/bukit-brown…

A little more than a decade ago, my cousin sought out our great grandmother's grave. With the help of amateur historians (I think of them more as amateur Lara Crofts LOL), he located her grave, and he hired a cemetery caretaker to clean it up. He gave me directions on how to find it.

One morning, I contacted my friend Chris, whom I knew walked around Bukit Brown most mornings, and asked if he would join me on a little adventure to find my great grandmother's grave. He gamely said yes. He helped me locate the general area that my cousin marked out, and he spent some time with me trying to find her grave. Unfortunately, he had to leave after a while, and I spent some more time making my way through the overgrown vegetation to find the grave. Alas, I could not find it. I'm not sure if my cousin had done any upkeep on the grave since he first discovered it, and I was expecting it to look somewhere between the first two photos in this entry, but I did not find anything that resembled either photo.

Despite the disappointment, I still had an interesting time exploring this historic site, and I am glad I took the time to do it. I did apologize to all the deceased laid to rest there for trampling around; I'm sure they'll forgive me since I was looking for my great grandmother.

I have since contacted another amateur Lara Croft - a friend of a friend - and she said she will look for the grave next time she is there and send me a pin drop. Hopefully my next jaunt will be more successful with the pin drop.

Included in this entry are photos of my great grandmother’s burial record, her obituary in the Straits Times, and a map of the area. All three photos are signs of the times:
- The burial record showed how short lives were at the time.

- The map indicates there was a paupers’ section. Indeed the graves there were modest. Apparently the British were appalled that poor Chinese weren’t buried, so they established the equivalent of a budget section, which is a little ironic given how class based British society was at the time.

- Perhaps most disturbing of all was the obituary. My grandfather and his male siblings, along with where they worked, were named in the obituary. His sisters were not named, but their husbands were. Only male grandchildren were named. In short, all the women and girls remained anonymous.Read more