Epitaphs that Enlighten: Finding the Stories in Headstones

In the 17th century, many new cemeteries were erected in churchyards and near synagogues within the 13 colonies. By the 19th century, with the onset of urbanization, large cemeteries, public and private, began to resemble the sprawling parks where many of our loved ones are buried today. These sacred grounds are not only for visiting and paying homage to our ancestors, but they are repositories rich with historical and genealogical information, some of which is imprinted or engraved on stone and marble headstones.

Headstones as Biographical Records of Death

Find a Grave^®, a website within the Ancestry^® family, comprising over a million individual contributors, and a dedicated team of administrators, contains over 210 million memorials to the buried and cremated deceased. 

Many of these memorials contain photographs of headstones, which elicit myriad information about the deceased. Headstones usually memorialize the vital dates of birth and death, but oftentimes can also tie husband to wife, mother to daughter, confirm the deceased’s childlessness, and even include sentiments of how their loved ones felt about them. 

Headstones for some communities and religious denominations provide especially detailed information about the deceased. For instance, headstones erected for people of the Jewish faith often include their Hebrew or Yiddish given name, and the names of their parents. This information can be helpful for locating immigration documents in instances where the individual entered a different country under their birth name which they subsequently changed upon arrival.

The headstone for Kive Perlman (1857-1948) lists his Hebrew name, the name of his father, his age at death, and his date of death according to the Hebrew calendar.

 

 

Headstones as Artful Records of Death

It is not uncommon for photographs of the deceased to be affixed or engraved into their headstones. Vincenzo Martini’s (1885-1926) face is memorialized in perpetuity on his headstone, for onlookers and ancestors to admire throughout the years. 

Other headstones provide clues about the interred’s profession or hobbies, for instance, a piano found on the grave of a pianist, or a metal helmet affixed atop a fireman’s headstone. The deceased’s military branch, or other professional affiliations may also appear, providing clues to the person’s life and experiences.

Headstones as Proof of Death: A Case Study

Though Ancestry has an expansive collection of death certificates and death indices from across the country and the world, depending on your ancestor’s place or date of death, many death records are conspicuously missing. In this case, looking into cemetery records within Find a Grave for vital dates may prove fruitful. Sometimes, though, an actual cemetery visit becomes necessary.

When researching the lineage of an African American family in the South, it became difficult to locate death dates for several individuals who lived and died in rural Virginia. Family lore suggested these individuals were buried on family farmland in the early 1900s. Because the deaths for these family members fell prior to 1935 when the Social Security Administration was founded, we would not expect to find them listed in the Social Security Death Index.

Relevant death indices were scoured both digitally and by hand, and local repositories consulted for any hidden record sets, but ultimately, proof of their deaths was nowhere to be found. This was not surprising due to the fact that the county’s recordings were notoriously incomplete, and this was an African American family subjected to discrimination and bureaucratic inaccessibility. As such, it seemed unlikely their dates of death were going to be found through conventional documentation.

Sure enough, a trip to the cemetery solved the genealogical mystery. There, we found handmade gravestones for infant deaths, and the missing second great-uncle’s headstone was found underneath a tall oak tree.  

Using Find a Grave^® to Discover Your Ancestor

Ancestry’s collection subcategory of Death, Burial, Cemetery & Obituaries contains close to 3,000 searchable collections from around the world. Searching your ancestor’s names may provide a link to their grave through a site such as Find a Grave.

Find a Grave pages often contain accompanying photographs of the deceased’s headstones, in addition to user-published obituaries and scanned photographs. When that fails, why not take a trip to the final resting place of your ancestors; pay your respects and maybe uncover a bit more about them.

If you’d like professional help from AncestryProGenealogists^® to help you navigate through memorial records and support you in creating a designed family history narrative, visit us www.progenealogists.com

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