Consider the Curtiss family, amongst the first settlers of the coastal town of Stratford, Connecticut. Last year, on a side trip after Netroots Nation in Providence, I visited some colonial-era New England cemeteries including the Old Congregational Burial Ground in Stratford. I photographed lots of graves, corresponding to names I knew to be in my family tree even tangentially. (You never know when you can suddenly fill in a branch after you find out the maiden name of a wife/mother previously only known by first name, for example.) This stone, erected by the Curtiss Society, provided several new items of information.
Quite a few of the tombstones I photographed were are not linked to my own family tree. But they might well be helpful to others, descended from those early New England settlers who have spread out throughout the country. Luckily, there's a crowd-sourced website called findagrave-dot-com that helps burial information to get shared widely. First I just looked there for information, then opened an account and added pictures to memorials already posted there.
More recently, I created new memorials for the graves I'd photographed which weren't entered on the site. (It grows all the time.) A few of those pictures responded to requests from other users, who invariably send delighted notes of thanks. I realized I could put requests in, too. I've done four so far, all of which were fulfilled within days. I, too, was delighted!! One can also add relationship links (parents, spouses) which can provide additional genealogical information, and request others add such links to existing memorials when you know something they don't.
For some people, findagrave looks to be the main place they assemble their genealogical information; there's some truly remarkable content.
I figured out some other things about the Curtisses, and other family names as well.
CURTISS
Especially in the early colonial days, many of the records left behind, such as wills and real estate transactions, are signed only with an "X", witnessed. Despite the traditional New England emphasis on education, many colonial settlers were illiterate. It's not all that surprising that spelling variations are found; here a man's name on his own tombstone and on his wife's don't match:
Despite irregularities of spelling, the members of Curtiss Society have been faithful to their double-S. I used the search features of findagrave.com to track their spelling. Turns out that even though those original settlers of Stratford came from England, there's no entries on findagrave for that spelling there. There are 512 of the more conventional spelling: Curtis. None in Wales or Scotland either. There's 11 in Canada, and four in Australia. And there's 4,813 in the United States. Here's a map showing where the listed graves for the surname Curtiss are located:
Wow! More than a quarter of them are in Connecticut. One must, of course, keep a caveat in mind: findagrave only shows information posted by the public. There's no reason to assume that people everywhere are so enthusiastic about this pastime as some Americans are.
What's more, those Curtisses are concentrated in Fairfield County, where Stratford is located. Another point to note is that very few graves from the 1600s survive, so the first few generations of colonial settlers are mostly not represented in these numbers. I figured there might be some spillover or diffusion into New York, especially given that the second highest number state is New York at 681. I was wrong: in Westchester and Putnam counties, which border Fairfield county, there's only 4 Curtiss graves. The highest number's in Oneida county, with 102, and other counties throughout the western part of the state have dozens. I figure this fits a pattern I've noticed many times before, New Englanders migrating out around the Great Lakes. Most of them were farmers, as were most Americans in earlier centuries. The quest to gain land of their own was likely a primary motivator, and the land around the Hudson Valley had already been taken.
SHUMWAY
The first Shumway in America was a man called Peter (Pierre?) Chamois from France, who anglicized his name. There was a significant migration of French Protestant Huguenots when their religion was outlawed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. He took up residence in Oxford, Massachusetts, via Boston, in a settlement of Huguenot families. One of their community specialities was the processing of hides, or chamois, particularly for the fashionable men's hats of the time; perhaps the name originated that way. Not everybody wants to keep their old name when they make a fresh start. The French settlement failed, not once but twice, primarily due to clashes with Indians who did not welcome their intrusion; eventually the town was permanently settled by mostly English colonists, but also some French.
From "Huguenots in the Nipmuck Country" by O. W. Holmes, 1875:
My father visited the site of the little colony in 1819 and 1825. He traced the lines of the fort, and was regaled with the perfumes of the shrubbery and the grapes then hanging in clusters on the vines planted by the Huguenots above a century before. I visited the place between twenty and thirty years ago and found many traces of the old settlement. After Plymouth, I do not think there is any locality in New England more interesting. This little band of French families, transported from the shore of the Bay of Biscay to the wilds of our New England interior, reminds me of the isolated group of magnolias which we find surrounded by the ordinary forest trees in our Massachusetts town of Manchester. It is a surprise to meet with them and we wonder how they came here, but they glorify the scenery with their tropical flowers and sweeten it with their perfume. Such a pleasing surprise is the effect of coming upon this small and transitory abiding place of the men and women who left their beloved and beautiful land for the sake of their religion. The lines of their fort may be obliterated, "the perfumes of the shrubbery" may no longer be perceived, but the ground they hallowed by their footsteps is sacred, and the air around their old Oxford home is sweet with their memory.
The only Shumways recorded on findagrave as buried in France are at the American military cemeteries for the two World Wars. There's only four in Canada. Here's the distribution in the 50 states, likely all descended from that one man who reinvented himself in the New World as "Peter Shumway":
Shumway
KENTFIELD
Peter Stuyvesant surrendered New Amsterdam to the British in 1664, and there was a series battles and wars of over nearly a century leading up to the French & Indian War in the 1750s. British soldier William Kentfield followed an atypical path to make his home in the new world, as a deserter stationed at Albany in 1700, after imprisonment for mutiny for which two ringleaders of the mutiny were hung.
William and another fellow deserted together in the spring of 1701, making their way east from Albany to the settlements along the Connecticut River in central Massachusetts.
Queen Anne's War started the next year, and life in those parts was generally violent & harsh. Kentfield died young in 1707, leaving an impoverished widow with two sons; probate records show him insolvent. No records have been found indicating he ever owned land of his own.
In England at the time, Kentfield was an uncommon, localized variation of the name Canfield, which name is also more common in the US. These two maps combine occurrences of Kentfield & Kenfield burials recorded at findagrave, but not Canfield or Kent which were also used by William Kentfield and his offspring upon occasion. There's more Kentfields in the US than this map shows, but one can maybe presume that the distribution's at least somewhat proportional. One can find inspiration, cook up hypotheses, draw inferences from search results at FindAGrave-dot-com.
In addition to the concentration of Kentfields where William first settled in New England, we also see them in upstate New York and Michigan.
DORE
I wanted to think that Richard Dore got sent to New England as a captured royalist soldier, sold into indenture by Oliver Cromwell. I had to discard that notion, because those deportations were in 1652, at which time Dore was only 7 years old. And I've looked through a (phonetic) list of those captives' names, too, and there's nothing close to Dore thereon. But I have found indications that his descendents intermarried with those indentured captives from the English Civil War. Richard Dore married at Dover, New Hampshire in 1673.
Whatever else he was, Dore was not an enthusiastic Puritan. Court records show he got fined for drinking, swearing, and fighting; he also got in trouble for violating an indenture contract. His will was signed with an X, so he was likely illiterate. His offspring, much more than the American population at large, were laborers rather than farmers. Census records show a lot of them working in the Maine woods; children as young as 14 were working in mill towns along the Maine/New Hampshire border, with some of them finding their way to metro Boston. Many women were listed on the US Census as mill and factory workers in the 1800s, mostly for clothing and textiles, very much including the New Hampshire shoe industry. Some went to sea, one of those ended up in the South. Some came to live around Lakes Michigan and Superior after a couple generations as English speakers in French Canada. There are several spellings: Door, Doore, Dore, Dorr and unrelated families from Ireland and Germany are intermingled:
Tips for Photographing Tombstones
The point of photographing at a cemetery is to record the information on the tombstones. The following tips can be helpful:
- Bring a small hand weed clipper and a soft handbroom: well-maintained cemeteries often have grass clippings on the stones, more neglected ones can benefit from overgrowth removed to see more of the inscription
- Nothing more! Efforts to mechanically or chemically removed lichen &c are best left to the professionals. One doesn't want to irreparably damage tombstones - historical objects and historical record.
- Some light is better than other light for photographing gravestones. It can take more than one visit to get a decent quality, readable image. If something's in too much shade in the early morning, try late in the day, or even high noon. (Or even another season.)
- Because of how the shadows fall, sometimes a picture taken from an angle to the right can work better than one from the left. (Or vice versa.)
- A flashlight can sometimes help create shadows, making the text easier to read
Miscellaneous Thoughts
This tombstone will soon likely disintegrate.
It's a public service to record such information
while it still can be done.
- New content is constantly being added at findagrave. That's on top of nearly 100 million records already crowd-sourced into the site's extensive database.
- When searching, make sure to click the box for "Include maiden name(s) in my search" for wider results.
- It's not necessary to visit a cemetery in person to add records at findagrave. Burial information can be found on death certificates, obituaries, &c, including at various online venues.
- Trust, but verify. FindAGrave-dot-com is crowd-sourced, so quality of information varies widely.
- Be respectful of copyright: only post your own images, public domain pictures or handed down photographs which you own.
- There's people who will go out and photograph a grave for you upon request; it's quite wonderful. Turnaround time tends to be very quick, within a few days.
- Before a cemetery visit, make note of the photo requests for that cemetery. You can make someone else's day with but a small effort.
- In general, cemeteries are not fully documented. There's pretty much always something to find in person, such as who shares the same burial plot.
- FindAGrave is useful in selecting cemeteries I'd like to visit. Not only does it help pick a likely candidate, they've got maps.
I've found very few stones from before 1700. (This one's dated 1698.)