Tombstone Tuesday: Centerville Pioneer Cemetery

After a month of lecture series preparations - and a computer crash - I'm back, I think. My computer was backed up, of course, but it still takes a while to get everything back in order. This new computer still doesn't feel like my old friend, but I'm sure it will become more familiar with time.

You all know of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but unless you live in California, you may not be familiar with the 21 October 1868 Hayward fault earthquake. Annie (Peacock) Hibberd died in 1866, two years before this almost 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit the Bay area. The people she left behind erected this tombstone as a memorial to her short life, and any present-day genealogists related to the family would be happy to find this stone where it rests in the Centerville Pioneer Cemetery. I was surprised to discover, though, that seismologists would also find a use for this stone and others from the same era in this cemetery. The USGS uses tombstones to study the shaking intensities of historic earthquakes! Part of this study is available online: "Inferring Shaking Intensities at Cemeteries that Have Suffered Multiple Damaging Earthquakes." I found it very interesting reading. Genealogists see tombstones and think about the person's life; social historians see tombstones and think about the culture of the time; seismologists see tombstones and think about earthquake damage. I wonder what other information tombstones provide.

Tombstone Tuesday: Magdalena Keller

This is another in my collection of "I-love-it-but-it's-not-family" tombstone photos. This stone marks the grave of Magdalena Keller, possibly the wife of John Philip Keller, in the Christ Reformed Cemetery in Middletown, Maryland. There are not a lot of tombstones in this cemetery made of this material and pierced around the edge. All of those I found mark the graves of German-speaking families buried in the late 1700s or very early 1800s. This stone reads, "Hier ruhet// Magdalena Kell// erin ist gestor// ben den 24 Iulius// 1805 Sie wahr alt// etwa 40 Iahr." Loosely translated, the inscription is "Here rests Magdalena Keller, died 24 July 1805. She was about 40 years old."

I took this photograph shortly before leaving Maryland in 2004. I grabbed my camera and drove to Middletown to photograph tombstones of the Shafer families and its allies, but couldn't resist a few extra photos. I took about ninety photos in this cemetery and uploaded the bunch to my Flickr site in a set called "Christ Reformed Cemetery, Middletown, Maryland." If you don't include Flickr in your tombstone searches, you may be missing a treasure. Flickr is tagged by its users, so you may need to be creative in searching the site for cemeteries and tombstones, but you should also be aware of some Flickr groups dedicated to tombstone photographs, especially "Graves of Veterans of the American Civil War" and the "Find A Grave" group.

My ninety photos from the Christ Reformed Cemetery pale when compared to the 775 residing on Find A Grave. Magdalena Keller's tombstone photo is here, but the person who created the memorial was apparently unfamiliar with the German language. She appears as "Ruthet Magdalena Kellerin." The transcriber misread the word Ruhet [rests] as a given name, and he was unfamiliar with the old naming convention in which the suffix -in was added to create the feminine surname form.

What other sites do you routinely include in your search for tombstone photographs, cemetery transcriptions, and burial records? Make sure you add Flickr to the list.

Tombstone Tuesday: Elisabeth (Wilcox) Stone

Sometimes, I photograph tombstones simply because I find them interesting or beautiful, poignant or fragile. The crude carving on Elisabeth Stone's marker in East Canton (Pennsylvania) Cemetery stood out. The fact that part of the stone appeared to be missing also attracted me, since I like to photograph stones before they disappear entirely. The missing segment, however, was an integral part of the stone. The letters were carved around it.

According to Heverly's Pioneer and Patriot Families of Bradford County, Pennsylvania (1913), 1: 327, Elisabeth was the daughter of Daniel Wilcox, a Massachusetts native and the first settler in Franklin township. Her husband, Benjamin, was also an early settler in the area, following Daniel from Massachusetts. Benjamin moved on to settle in LeRoy, where he and Elisabeth raised six children, several of them also buried in this cemetery.

Tombstone Tuesday: Palmer Burial Ground

This small family burial ground is in Sullivan township in Tioga County, Pennsylvania. I would never have been able to find it without my guide, Joyce Tice. It was literally "over the river and through the woods." Isn't it wonderful? I wonder what this plot looked like a hundred years ago.

Joyce is one of those wonderful people who maintain county web sites. She began with RootsWeb back in 1996, and her site is one of the best on the web. If you're interested in families in Bradford County or Tioga County, Pennsylvania, or Chemung County, New York, you must visit her site, Tri-Counties Genealogy & History.

Tombstone Tuesday: Milton Case

I missed this tombstone the first time I visited Windfall Cemetery in Granville township, Bradford County, Pennsylvania. On this day, though, the grass had just been cut, so this small fieldstone marker was visible. If you can't make out the crude lettering, the inscription reads, "M. A. Case// died May the 5// aged 1 yr. 12 days". Obviously, the stone was not cut by a professional, but perhaps more love and sorrow went into its making than most.

Milton Case, the toddler buried here, does not appear in the Erastus Ely Case manuscript, but he was named in an anonymous, undated two-page typescript held by the Bradford County Historical Society as a son of John and Julia Ann (Ward) Case. I love this small memorial to a too short life.

Tombstone Tuesday: Simeon Stephens

Simeon Stevens was a Captain during the Revolutionary War. He's buried next to his first wife, Sarah Hadley, in Oxbow Cemetery, Newbury, Vermont. This cemetery is the resting place for many Revolutionary War veterans, so there are quite a few old tombstones here. Since Simeon and Sarah are my six-greats grandparents, their tombstones are among my favorites - of course.

This image is a scan of a 35 mm black-and-white negative, but a better image can be found in a wonderful online collection: the Farber Gravestone Collection. If you have New England ancestors, or you're simply interested in tombstones, please visit this web site. Tombstones are not just sources that provide birth and death dates for genealogists. Early stones are also examples of folk art, and many people specialize in the study of these early artists. Simeon's stone was carved by Gershom Bartlett, a native of Bolton, Connecticut. Until he was identified, Bartlett's distinctive style gave him the nickname, "Hook-and-Eye Man". A Google search for Bartlett will take you to more photographs and several interesting stories.

The next time you're happily photographing or transcribing your six-great grandparents' gravestones, take a moment to thank the artist. Enjoy!

Tombstone Tuesday: My Grandmother's Grave

I suspect I'll have trouble coming up with ideas for "Black Sheep Sunday" and "Madness Monday", but "Tombstone Tuesday" should cause no problems at all. Don't we all have lots of cemetery photos and stories? Here is a photo of my paternal grandmother's tombstone in Glen Haven Memorial Park. After we found her stone, one of my fellow Jamboree attendees reminded me, "Don't forget to look at the neighboring tombstones!" I didn't think anyone else in the family was buried here, but we looked anyway. Lo and behold, right next to Nana was her son-in-law! I'm glad someone from the family is buried near her. It always seems a little sad to find one family member buried all alone.

Of course, this visit reminded me of other cemetery visits, and I realized that this was only the second grandparent whose grave site I've visited! Can you believe it? I've visited hundreds of cemeteries, but I've never been to either grandfather's grave. Time and circumstances have scattered my grandparents' graves to the four corners of the U.S. My paternal grandfather is buried in Woodmere Cemetery in Detroit; my maternal grandfather rests in Maple Street Cemetery in Bethlehem, New Hampshire; my maternal grandmother's grave is in Rest Haven Cemetery in Long Beach, Mississippi; and my paternal grandmother is buried in Sylmar, California. My husband's four grandparents, on the other hand, are buried in two cemeteries less than thirty miles apart. "Wordless Wednesday" is a good opportunity to show you my grandparents' burial map. Can anyone top this?