NS4076 : The Ward Family Memorial
taken 13 years ago, near to Bellsmyre, West Dunbartonshire, Scotland

The inscriptions on several sides of the stone are headed by the names of John and Helen Ward. Regarding them, the text on the near side records that the shipbuilder John Ward died on the 20th of March 1912, aged 64 years, and that his wife Helen Elizabeth Kerr died on the 7th of June 1931, aged 76 years. Another side of the memorial mentions John's earlier wife, Annie Philips, who died in 1874, aged 26.
The photograph was intentionally taken from an angle where the sun's reflection would highlight carvings on the upper part of the obelisk. The design visible on that part of the memorial is one that is often referred to as the Greek honeysuckle pattern.
The cemetery was formally opened on the 4th of October, 1854, replacing the overcrowded parish churchyard. See the Geograph article "Dumbarton Cemetery" – Link – for a detailed discussion. For biographies of many of those buried here, and for descriptions of their memorials, see Donald MacLeod's "The God's Acres of Dumbarton" (1888), and the same author's "Dumbarton: Its Recent Men and Events" (1898). By 2010, there was concern that Dumbarton Cemetery would run out of space within a decade; New Dumbarton Cemetery – Link – was subsequently created uphill from the existing cemetery, and opened at the end of December 2015.
