This weekend was my first genealogical trip to a cemetery. I went to Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn, where a significant number of my relatives are buried. It was a very pleasant day, sunny, breezy, quiet - but not particularly genealogically fruitful. Since it costs
a nice little fortune to request anymore than a gravesite location in Catholic cemetery in the Brooklyn diocese, and I'm a poor graduate student working part-time, I figured I'd skip that part and hope that the stones themselves would provide me some information. I ended up with pictures, but no information. Still worth going, I think. So I'll post the gravestones I found at intervals, starting with that of Hugh J. Quinn, Grandma Molly's father and my great-great-grandfather, who died in 1914.
The location inscription indicates that this stone represents 2 graves, so I imagine that he is interred with his wife, Mary Gillen Quinn, as well as, potentially, others. Maybe his hypothetical first wife? (Remember, he appears to have
a daughter named Anna who considerably predates his marriage to Mary Gillen.) Children? Siblings? Who knows.
What's very clear, of course, is that his name, undeniably, was QUINN. No questions there.
Visiting a cemetery was a little different than I expected. I was there for
genealogy. You know, research stuff. And the next thing I knew, I was feeling profoundly connected to these people, my relatives, being physically in the same place as they are. I said more prayers than I took notes.
It was totally worth it.
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