In the year since I have been doing research on my family’s genealogy, I have made numerous discoveries. Among the bits of information I learned was the name of my German great-great-grandfather, and the cemetery where his grave is located. My g-g-grandfather was probably the first of my ancestors to come to the US; this would have been in the early 1840s. (On the other hand, it may have been his first wife, my g-g-grandmother, but it’s much harder to find information about her.) My g-g-grandfather died at the age of 73, in 1893, the year my grandfather was born.
While I was back in the Baltimore area for the holidays, I figured I could actually visit the cemetery and see if I could find his grave. It occurred to me that it may be at least 50 years, and more likely something like 80 years, since anyone had actually visited the grave. The cemetery is Western Cemetery, which turns out to be in a not-very-good neighborhood of Baltimore. The cemetery itself is pretty innocuous, though. What are the dead going to do to a visitor, after all?
I arrived in the late morning last Friday, found the office of the cemetery, and was disappointed to find no one there. After wandering around, looking at grave stones so old and weathered that they were unreadable, I noticed a caretaker on the grounds. I approached him and told him I was looking for a particular grave, and he went to the office and looked up its location, as well as other information about the grave. He then led me to the site of the grave, which left both of us a little confused. There were old weathered grave stones nearby, but even though they were hard to read, the name on them was not my family name. Going back to the records, the caretaker recognized that the markers we saw were for the adjacent plot, and that there were no markers at all on my family’s plot. Apparently, they couldn’t afford a marker, even after a lifetime of work. I was planning to take a photo, but it would have just been a photo of dying grass on a gently sloping hill.
But for that additional information… the caretaker was able to consult the records regarding who else was buried there. According to the records, there were three other people buried in that plot. First, there was his second wife, who died just two days after he did. I knew about her from marriage and census records, but I could find no record of what had happened to her; now I knew. I’d heard of such things happening, but was unaware that it had happened in my own family. Further, two of his infant grandchildren, who died a year or two before he did, were buried there.
The caretaker told me two other pieces of information. One was that my g-g-grandfather bought the plot in 1858. The other was that there are no records of who in the cemetery is buried where before 1874, the year that the State of Maryland started requiring cemeteries to keep such records. Something else I knew is that my g-g-grandmother, g-g-grandfather’s first wife, died in 1861 at the age of 42 after delivering twin girls. Given that g-g-grandfather owned the plot already at that time, I would bet a significant sum of money that she is buried in that plot as well—but there’s no official record of it, nor is there a marker that might be able to confirm it.
So I was able to pay my respects to my antecedents and other family members that I didn’t even know existed much more than a year ago, and I learned some new and valuable information. I’m not sure I’ll ever go back again, though I’d be happy to accompany other family members who might be interested in visiting the grave. So many years have passed that not even my grandfather knew who anyone in that grave was. I’m trying to reconstruct some portion of their lives from what I can learn from government and church documents, but that’s pretty limited.
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Top Comments (January 5, 2018):
From armd:
I'd like to suggest this comment by anon004. Why? It starts off with humor in the first paragraph, along with a nicely phrased insight ("Being heterosexual doesn’t seem like a lot of effort for me...") which I will remember to use myself, and in the second para makes an incisive critique of the "logic" of those who would claim that a gay judge would need to recuse himself or herself from marriage equality cases…
From Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter Poza’s front page post regarding the Trump administration’s latest anti-LGBT nominee for the bench.
Top Mojo (January 4, 2018):
Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
Top Photos (January 4, 2018):
Tonight’s picture quilt is courtesy of jotter!