Cemeteries

Well here I go walking back into a cemetery.  Last weekend, my friend George and I went to East Orange, to Holy Sepulcher cemetery, which is a huge Catholic Cemetery located between exit 144 and 145 on the Garden State Parkway.  When you live in New Jersey, you describe the area where you live by exit number on the GSP, I live off of exit 98.  Anyway, Holy Sepulcher is a huge cemetery and the GSP goes right up the middle of it, you can't miss it from the Parkway.  So all George has is a section and plot number and there is nobody working at the cemetery to give us any help in finding the grave.  When you drive into the cemetery,  you see headstones as far as the eye can see, except of course for the Garden State Parkway running past you.

We looked for an hour in the section where the grave was listed and I headed to the car, because it was getting a little chilly.  George wanted to look down one more row, so I drove the car to where we would finish, and parked there and got out and started looking again.  Then George calls me saying that he found it.  This was George's great grandfather, and he was a Polish immigrant who died in 1922 and I cannot begin to try to spell the name we were looking for.  But George found the headstone, and get this, it was home made.  Yeah, you read it right, it was home made.  The headstone was a big thick poured concrete block.  It looks like whoever made it used pipes for a mold or like re-bar to hold it together.  And the top had a rusty pipe sticking up, maybe it had been fashioned like a cross and had rusted away over the years.  But the writing on the front with the deceased's name looked like it was written with a stick in almost dry cement.  Like when you were a kid and someone poured a sidewalk or patio, and you would put your hand print there when it was almost dry.  It was very interesting, not to mention difficult to read, because it was also written in Polish.  It looks like whoever created the headstone poured the block graveside, because I don't know how they would have gotten it here from another location.  It looks a lot heavier than anything that I'd care to try to move. So George took pictures and will try to get a translation of the writings.

Here is a not so good photo of George's Great Grandfather's headstone, I inadvertently cut out the remnants of the cross on top.  If you look real  close you can see that someone took the time to scratch in a cross and the letters "S" and "P" on either side of the cross.  This has some meaning, but I don't know what it is.  Then they scratched in his name, and death date (written in Polish) along with two Polish words, which are probably religious, but again, I'm not sure.  But it is unique.  I wish I had gotten a photo of the grave to the left, it is also a poured form with small stones stuck in the front for decoration.

After that I realized that nothing could top that find, but we moved on to Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington, NJ because I wanted to see the grave of the aforementioned Sterlings - John and Mary, and their daughter Mary Sheehan and her husband Michael Sheehan, John and Mary's other daughter Catherine and I think their son, John (Augustus).  Well it was only about 15 minutes to a half hour away from East Orange and this cemetery is also huge and Catholic.  Holy Cross is very active, we saw about six burials were taking place that day and there was actually a lot of traffic in there, by contrast Holy Sepulcher was bigger, but we only saw a few cars there.

We went to the Office and they give you a little map to the plot you are looking for.  So off we go to see the headstone for all of these ancestors buried together.  We are walking through the section looking for the headstone, and what I found was not surprising.  All it said was "STERLING", nothing more, nothing less.I was kind of expecting to see a list of names, maybe birth or death dates, but no, that was it.  No home made headstone with a cross made of pipe, no name and date and foreign sayings that need translation.  No not for me today - just "STERLING".  It was really kind of a let down, although I wasn't surprised.  Every BRADY headstone I tracked down in cemeteries across Pennsylvania had the same prize after all of my searching - "BRADY".  Oh well.