A stone in a field

As a child we never traveled much. My mother suffered (and suffers) from agoraphobia. It is as though an invisible fence was drawn around our house and she cannot breach it. It is slightly better now but when I was young it was severe.

On one of the few outings we were about five miles from home, a veritable trans-continental journey, when my mom pointed out a large field. On the edge of the field was a small tombstone. She said it was a relative and then my young triplet brothers acted up in the back seat and the conversation was lost.

Twenty years later I was very interested in family history. Both of my grandparents were still alive and I would constantly question them about our family. I heard a lot of stories but very little information. When I hit my thirties I really got into genealogy. I spent a lot of cold mornings walking through cemeteries finding very little. One day I was driving past that field and saw the stone. The field seemed even bigger than I remembered and the lone stone stood out. In front of the field was an old rusted sign with the name of the cemetery. That memory came back and I pulled over to see the stone. The stone said Wm Burgett and underneath Father. Genealogy had been a hobby for a while but now I was stoked. Who was William and how was he related to me? Why was there only one stone in the field?

I walked over to the Catholic church that the cemetery was named after and spoke to the priest. He said that it was an old priest that was buried there? I asked if there were any records and he said that they all burned in a fire. I looked at the date on the stone of his death and went to the local library. Luckily our library has a nice local history section and I was able after a number of hours searching through microfiche to find the census records of William and his children. William was born in 1852 and died at age fifty in 1902. It was pretty obvious from seeing his wife and children in the census that the priest was wrong about Williams vocation. I find out William was a bricklayer coming from a whole line of such.

A week later I went back to the cemetery to take some pictures and a woman was in her backyard next to the field. I started a conversation with her and she told me she knew all about it. Supposedly years ago the cemetery was full of stones, mostly of immigrants. She said that most were immigrants, Germans and Hungarians. The cemetery had been ignored and horribly overgrown. Children would play there and boys would use stones as bases in impromptu baseball games. One day in the sixties bulldozers came and started knocking down the stones, putting them in trucks and dumping them in a landfill. She said that the land was to be sold but one couldn't sell a cemetery. They were almost done when a man was walking down the street and saw them approach a stone. He yelled, "You can't do that! That is my grandfather's tombstone!" They immediately stopped and that is where it stands.

As I researched more and more I found out that the man buried in the field is my great-great grandfather and the man who yelled was one of his grandsons, possibly my grandfather. This only created more questions. Why was he buried in a Catholic cemetery? I had never heard of anyone in my family being catholic. How could this happen to a cemetery? It was time to go back to the library.

I found a cemetery book that showed that some of the graves had been moved to another cemetery, but not very many. Then I found a small reference to a teacher who had taken her grade school there and the kids had done a report on it. I got out the phone book and found the teacher. I called her and surprisingly she remembered the project. She even said she had some of the papers and that she would send them to me. A week later a few came in the mail. The papers were obviously done by children and most talked about the shame of letting a cemetery fall into such disrepair. The surprise was a few of the kids added drawings of some of the tombstones with names and information. The names were all foreign sounding and obviously Hungarian and German.

I never did find any more information on the cemetery. I'd like to know what is true and what what isn't. Some of the stones were moved but I would love to find the landfill where the stones were taken. Perhaps when I retire I'll have the time to do more research on it. I've spoken to a few more priests about it and heard some weird stories. One priest told me that it was a dog of one of the priests that was buried there.

I did find out that my great-grandparents Joseph Burgett (William's' son) and Elizabeth Snyder divorced sometime around 1912 and that is why they were no longer in the Catholic church. That is why I had never looked in a Catholic cemetery while doing research. Once I became aware of this I was able to find all of the kin going back to Nicoli Burkard in St. Teresa's cemetery in Sheffield Village. Nicolai was born in 1793 and died in 1877.

A couple of years later I was driving down Gulf Road in Elyria when I saw something out of the corner of my eye in a cemetery. It was the same stone as the lone one in the field. I was so excited that I could barely get to the stone fast enough. This was Williams wife's stone, Lavina. I was to find out later that William and Lavina's son Joseph (my great grandfather) made both the stones.

It's funny how genealogy is. One thing leads to a whole world of information. I know almost nothing about William but searching through a local paper microfiche in 1905 I found this item about Lavina. This was the first time I've ever laughed out loud at the library.

I've always been amazed at where things take us. Many times in my life I've felt like that stone in the field. Understanding family history has helped me see my place in the world and a little less alone.