Grove Street Cemetery dates from 1796, but includes tombstones moved from the earlier colonial burial ground in New Haven. (For more information about the history of the cemetery see Grove Street Cemetery.) The cemetery borders the Yale campus and as you would expect, there are many presidents of the university buried there. But there are also many other graves of historic interest: Eli Whitney, Noah Webster, Charles Goodyear (inventor of vulcanized rubber), and prominent early American scholars, divines, merchants and soldiers.
El Jefe and I have walked around here before, when Portia was an undergraduate. But we didn't realize then that some of my direct ancestors were among the colonial settlers of New Haven and a couple of other neighboring towns. So we thought we'd see if we could find any evidence of them in the cemetery.
The entrance is marked by this Egyptian Revival Gate--very Middle Eastern looking.
El Jefe and I have walked around here before, when Portia was an undergraduate. But we didn't realize then that some of my direct ancestors were among the colonial settlers of New Haven and a couple of other neighboring towns. So we thought we'd see if we could find any evidence of them in the cemetery.
The entrance is marked by this Egyptian Revival Gate--very Middle Eastern looking.
The cemetery is landscaped beautifully and there's a lot of effort made to maintain a park-like setting.
El Jefe says that this Sphinx (one of two) was left in the cemetery after the local library was remodeled because no one quite knew what to else to do with them. Perhaps they thought the pair of spinxes went well with the Egyptian Revival Gate?
Eureka! We found it--a tombstone of one of the ancestors. It doesn't mark a grave, because the stones were moved away from the old common burial ground on the town green when the cemetery was created. It is more readable than most of them, and has the flying death's head ornament on the top which was the symbol of the soul going up to God.
Double Eureka! We also found this bonus ancestral grave of a woman who was related to the family. She's buried in her husband's family plot.
I wish that I had planned a drive up to Salem to see where my many times great-grandmother was executed as a witch during the infamous witchcraft trials of the colonial period. It was just too much to squeeze into this quick trip. I have to wonder if this is why both Portia and I wrote major research papers on the Salem witch trials when we were in college. Even though we did not know then that we were related to one of the "witches."
~cue Twilight Zone theme music~
