My Grandmother's Grave

Last week I wrote in The Cemetery Traveler about visiting the graves of my Mom’s “lost” siblings (see link at end to revisit that story). This week will be a continuation of that odyssey. On the same day, after visiting Evergreen Cemetery in Shavertown, Pennsylvania, where my mom’s two brothers and sister are buried, my mom, my brother Tim, and I drove across the Susquehanna River into one of the south Wilkes-Barre suburbs, Hanover, to visit her mom’s (my grandmother) grave.

Anna Jones does not have a gravestone. According to my mom, my deceased father didn’t want to spend the money. So all we had to go on for locating her grave in Hanover Green Cemetery was my mom’s memory and a deed to a double plot. If memory failed, we could ask in the office. Why did we not know where it was? My father was not interested in my mother’s family and actually would not allow her to visit her mother’s grave. I don’t know how long it had been since my mother was last here – but my grandmother died in 1964. 

Zinc Memorial at Hanover Green

After driving around in the rain to the area in which my mom thought the grave was, we gave up as she did not recall any familiar landmarks. I myself had some notion that I had been there before, but you know me – my memory’s so good I can remember things whether they happened or not. So I grabbed the deed and told my mom and brother I would go ask in the office. My mom said she could never do that, afraid that the office workers might think, “What kind of daughter is this? She doesn’t even know where her own mother is buried!”  I told her not to worry, that I’d go in by myself with the deed and find out. 

I had never examined a deed to a grave before. I found it interesting that the cost of the two side-by-side plots in 1964 was only $150! One hundred dollars for the graves and fifty for perpetual care. In comparison, in case you're wondering, forty-eight years later in 2012 a plot at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia will set you back $5,000!

The fellow behind the desk was very helpful and accommodating. I showed him the deed and he began looking it up in his computer database. I strolled over to a big plot map on the wall and located the two plots in question, # 1017 and 1018. I pointed this out to him but he dismissed the map as being inaccurate. After about ten minutes, he pinpointed the plots and led me outside. It was raining, so he sprinted across the grounds and we were to follow after I collected my mom and brother Tim from the car (Tim graciously chauffeured us around all that day).

My Mom at Hanover "Green"

Upon our arrival, we found the cemetery guy standing on a large open spot covered in ratty brown grass. Not a very picturesque place. He said, “I knew where the spot was because of the plots next to yours.” We thanked him and he returned to the office. My mom said she thought he would be “old and bent over.” “Sort of a John Carradine-type character?” I asked. She laughed and agreed. Life is full of irony and contradictions (take Red Bull smoothies, for instance).

Brother Tim and our Mom

We didn’t spend much time there, as there was nothing to see but the ground under which my grandmother was buried. My mom said, “I remember you could see houses down the hill from her grave, so this must be it.” She told me later that she said a little prayer as we began to walk away. 

I don’t know what the prayer was, but it just might have been answered − as we headed back to the car, we looked up under our rain-soaked umbrellas and saw the cemetery guy running toward us with a big rolled-up map in his hand. He stopped before us and said, “I’m sorry, that’s not your mother’s plot.” Ouch. Though the photo below wasn't taken at that moment, my brother's look of surprise shows how we all must have felt!

"You showed us the wrong grave ...?"

He told us he would take us to the correct spot so we followed him across the cemetery in the car, back to the original area where my mom thought the grave was! Which, coincidentally, was the same area the map on the wall showed. So much for databases. I was a bit perturbed, but still, we would not have found it without him. He explained the mistake in the database and apologized again.

Here’s a photo of the double plot, with the cemetery worker standing on Anna's grave. Doesn't look like much, but it now has deep meaning for all of us. We stood there for a few minutes after he left, and I asked my mom if she’d like to get a stone made for her mother’s grave. She replied, “Maybe a small one – they’re so expensive.” So I’ll look into that. 

I pretty much spent the first six years of my life with my grandmother Anna - she died when I was six. I kind of remember the viewing and funeral. My father worked in the mines at the time and my mother worked in a factory, so my mom would drop me off at my grandparents’ apartment every morning. I really liked spending the day with them, Anna and Daniel, Grandma and Grandpop  – I even remember the layout of their apartment. I had a big bag of toys by the television. My mom said that Anna treated me like a king. I was their only grandchild. My brother was born shortly before she died in 1964. Our sister Donna Lee was born in 1966, so she never knew Anna. Before we left Anna’s grave, my mom said, “I’m glad she got to hold Tim before she died.” 

Plaque at Hanover Green

I like Hanover Green Cemetery. It's low key and in a pleasant, quiet neighborhood. The cemetery’s founding pre-dates the Declaration of Independence by a month – June 9, 1776 – which I think will make it a fitting final resting spot for my mom when the time comes. In a way, a final declaration of her own independence from my father, who is buried twenty miles away.




Related Link:
"Graves of Lost Siblings" blog posting

Graves of Lost Siblings

In a couple weeks I’m planning a trip, the trip of a lifetime. A few years ago, my Mom let it be known that she was in fact, not an only child. She had two brothers and a sister. They were all born seven to ten years after her, and all died shortly after birth. My Mom also let it be known that they were buried in a cemetery in Shavertown, Pennsylvania (near where she lives in northeast PA), the vicinity in which I was born and raised. I’ve asked her to take me there, to see the graves. I’m writing this before the fact. I’m not at all sure what I’m in for. So keep your hat on, we may end up miles away from here.

Since my Dad died eight years ago, my Mom has been talking. This may seem unusual. However, my Dad was overbearing to the point where he monopolized all conversations and didn’t allow other people to speak − and this was one of his better qualities. Our lives basically revolved around his family. My Mom’s family was seldom mentioned, and never visited – the living or dead.

So after he died, my Mom started to talk. It’s been great. I’ve learned wonderful things about her family – my family. The most shocking thing was the existence of Robert Daniel, Daniel Robert, and Joyce Elizabeth − and the fact that she knew where they were buried.

I didn’t know any of this back in 1981 when my first wife was pregnant with our first child. It died in utero and had to be aborted.  My mother, after the fact, wanted to have a tree planted in the baby’s memory in a local park. Both my ex-wife and I thought that was ludicrous. We just wanted to forget the horrific experience. About twenty years later, my mother told me that she had gone ahead anyway and had that tree planted. I figured, whatever, if it means that much to you, fine. I forgot about the tree until she began telling me about her lost siblings.

I realized in a flash how meaningful it was to her to plant that tree. She needed something like that to hold on to the memory of what, at the time, would have been her first grandchild. People cherish things they’ve lost in all sorts of ways, and far be it for me to criticize any of them. Over the past thirty years I've provided my mom with FOUR wonderful grandchildren, all of whom she loves and adores. Perhaps even more than she would have if she had not lost the first.

My mom, Beverly Snyder, at the grave of her grandparents

So the fateful day arrived when we planned to visit the cemetery where her siblings are buried. We did this yesterday – my Mom, my brother Tim, and I. After literally months of ninety-degree weather and near-drought conditions in this part of the country, this is the day it rained like hell. I made the wet, hundred mile drive to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the general area in which my Mom lives. We all jumped into my brother’s car and drove out to Shavertown, where Evergreen Cemetery resides. I lived around here for the first nineteen years of my life and never knew this cemetery existed.

My great-grandparents' grave, Evergreen Cemetery

My mom, it turned out, had not been to Evergreen since 1945, when her newborn sister Joyce Elizabeth died, and was buried here. She surprised herself by remembering approximately where the plots were, but we had to search a bit for the actual grave markers. First we found the Jones plot, in which are buried her grandparents, Daniel and Elizabeth Jones. Seeing my mom standing on her grandparents’ graves and looking teary was heartbreaking, as she said that my deceased father had not allowed her visit these graves. Daniel and Elizabeth had a son, Daniel Jr. (who is not buried here), who became my mom's father. Daniel Sr. died in 1920 and Elizabeth later remarried Robert Berwick, whose family plot is about fifty feet away. My mom’s siblings are all buried at the larger Berwick plot.

Brother Tim and my Mom

Until I saw the headstones, I thought it unusual (or even uncreative) to name your first-born boys Robert Daniel and Daniel Robert. But seeing the names engraved on the stones explained all: Daniel was the children's (including my mom) biological grandfather and Robert was their step-grandfather. (My middle name, by the way, is Daniel.) As I said, I always thought my mom was an only child. Her parents Daniel Jr. and wife Anna tried to have more children after my mom was born (in 1938), but the children did not live. Daniel Robert contracted pneumonia and died shortly after birth. Robert Daniel was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and died at birth. (My twenty-one year old son Christopher was also born with the cord wrapped around his neck, but as the delivery took place in a tertiary care medical center in 1990, he received better medical care and survived.)

My mom was six or eight years old when her brothers were born (and died) and does not remember much about the situation. She was ten, however, when her sister Joyce Elizabeth was born. She remembers the baby had a dislocated hip, among other problems, and died shortly after birth. Although the boys were buried at the Berwick family plot, she was not present at the burial. She does remember, however, being present at Joyce Elizabeth’s burial. She said “I remember them lowering that little white casket into the ground.” I just about broke down when she said that. 

Tim and Mom at the Berwick plot

Standing on their graves sixty-seven years later, she added, “They were all beautiful babies. I wonder what they would have looked like if they lived.” I suggested, "Like you?" She smirked and said, "What, short and fat?" None of the children’s names appear on the Berwick stone, for whatever reason. A gigantic evergreen shades the plot. As I was standing beneath it with my family, feeling firmly present in my past, I thought about that tree my mother had planted for my almost-firstborn. I can’t imagine ever being strong enough to visit it, wherever it is.