The Cemetery

The search for ancestors can become a tedious affair, particularly when it is confined to internet searches.  There are so many rabbit-holes and dead ends, excitement and anticipation when a new path opens up, then disappointment and discouragement when it leads nowhere.  For five months after my visit to the NYC Archives, I scuffled around in an internet maze, searching and researching, stumbling blindly down virtual corridors and alleyways that only seemed to lead me back to my starting point with no new information in hand. Finally, the weekend for the rescheduled poetry reading arrived, and I headed to New York, hoping that Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn might yield more information than the digital backrooms I had been frequenting.

I had my great-great grandmother's death certificate with  me, and I went to the cemetery office, showed it to the secretary there, and she found the grave site number.  I was filled with hope as I wended my way through the gravestones that at last a breakthrough was at hand.  When I got to my great-great grandmother's grave site, this is what I found:

My great-great grandmother Catharine was buried in an unmarked grave.  Another rabbit-hole, another dead-end.  Dejected, I trudged back to the cemetery office where I had left my car.  On a whim, I went back into the office and gave the lady there the names of my great-great grandfather Cornelius and my great grandfather Jeremiah.  She checked the cemetery database and told me matter-of-factly, "oh, yes, they're buried together."

 

The pictures of the grave site speak for themselves. My great-great grandfather, my great grandfather and great grandmother, my great uncle John, and my great aunt Anna (John was only a rumor, and I had never even heard of Anna before this), are all buried at the site. The fact that there was no birth date for Cornelius did little to dampen the utter exhilaration I felt.  After so much time spent chasing my ancestors through an ephemeral digital world, here was something tangible, something REAL, to connect me to them.  I stared at the stone for endless minutes, then hugged it, then danced around it.  Luckily, there was no one else in Holy Cross Cemetery on a Friday afternoon, so my antics went unnoticed by the living.

When I was finally able to tear myself away, I drove over to Greenwood Cemetery.  Whereas Holy Cross is a Catholic cemetery, Greenwood is a secular one.  According to his death certificate, this is where my great uncle Cornelius is buried. I located his grave site where he is buried along with his wife Mary, his son Harry, and his daughter Catherine Daly.

Finally, I went to the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn where my ancestors had resided in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  I found the house at 313 Clinton Street where my great grandfather died in 1919.  

Now that I had the date of death for Cornelius from the gravestone, I was able to identify which of the death certificates I had seen in the Archives was his.  He died in 1880 at 98 Summit Street.

The house where Cornelius Jr had died -- 296 Sackett Street -- had been torn down and replaced by modern condominiums.  The house where my great-great grandmother Catharine died -- 66 Warren Street -- also no longer exists, having been removed to make way for the Brookly-Queens Expressway which now cuts through the old neighborhood.

Not bad for a day's work.  I didn't get any closer to to the information leading me back to Ireland, but I now had a real connection to all the generations that had lived here.  

There was one mystery I had uncovered.  Why was my great-great grandmother buried in an unmarked grave in the same cemetery where such a grand family gravestone was also located?