I took this picture of Sintha Peck’s gravestone in Old Ashford Cemetery in Ashford, Connecticut, on a chilly winter’s day a couple of years ago. Cemeteries are remarkable places, and I’m particularly drawn to those that memorialize early Americans in eighteenth-century spaces. In the nineteenth century American cemeteries expanded, became larger and even designed (think Mount Auburn), moving away from smaller, more profuse family, town, and churchyard graveyards that dotted the eighteenth-century landscape. The ways that individuals and families buried their kin, when they were free to do so, can tell us a lot about family relationships and priorities. And gravestones are themselves remarkable examples of #VernacularGenealogy.
I’m glad to have this picture on the cover of Lineage for two reasons, first because gravestones are so important and because they stand for an important theme (and chapter) in the book namely the ways that death so profoundly shaped genealogical thinking and practice. And second, because it’s cool to include this particular picture, which I have such a clear memory of taking on a family outing.
One of my favorite Instagram accounts is @gravestonesofnewengland, which highlights examples of 17th and 18th century gravestones –and their carvers– from all around the New England states. The site’s creator acknowledges work that also influenced mine, especially that of Harriette Merrifield Forbes and the terrific Farber Collection of gravestone images at the American Antiquarian Society which incorporates some of her work. But nothing beats exploring and experiencing these sites in person. Just as digital library research is gratifying and important, being with the rare materials can give you so much more sensory and other information. Being on site with a grave can tell you something about its situation with other stones, its relationship to the built and natural landscapes now and possibly earlier, and its state of care. New England’s gravestones and cemeteries in some ways reflect general British American practices, but in others are quite specific. The difference between rural and more urban settings was always significant, and the profusion of towns in New England versus Virginia, for example, where settlement was so much more spread out, shaped the burial landscape.
Only two years old when she died, Sintha Peck’s stone reflects the harsh reality of early mortality in early America. Mothers and their young children were particularly, per my last post, vulnerable. Sintha’s parents, Ebenezer and Elizabeth, lost at least one other young child who is buried in Ashford, their son Abihu. Elizabeth also died, Ebenezer remarried and had several more children with Lydia, his second wife. His will, probated at nearby Pomfret, was signed only with a mark rather than a signature. So interesting given the care with which little Sintha’s stone, albeit by comparison to some quite crusty done, was crafted and her death narrated.
Mother and baby stones are not rare, but this 1770 one in Worcester County, Massachusetts, “In Memory of Mrs. Martha Green (& Infant Babe)” is unusual in its sculptural detail. The gravestone scholar Allan Ludwig credits this stone to the carver Daniel Hastings. Martha was young, only 25 as her stone noted, and had married Peter Green less than a year before she died. The heartfelt tribute to Martha may have been continued when Peter and his second wife, Ruth, named their first child and daughter Martha.