There's Just Something About An Old Cemetery

 

     One of my favorites on You Tube is a series called Sidestep Adventures.  It's an amateur enterprise consisting of videos made by a man named Robert and his sidekicks as they explore cemeteries in Georgia.  The older and less accessible the better.  This series featuring titles like, "Abandoned Cemetery Found in The Woods", and "Civil War Soldier Found In Abandoned Cemetery", kept me amused all last winter while a snow-covered ground made cemetery rambles unpleasant and unproductive here in upstate New York.

     A few days ago, it felt as though I had stepped into one of those videos myself.  There is a very old burial ground in Auburn, New York called Cold Spring Cemetery that I'd long wanted to visit.  This was the first Catholic cemetery in Auburn and many of the city's famine immigrants are interred there, including relatives of mine.  An inventory done in 1964 listed several McGarr and O'Hora stones, as did another done in 1984, so bright and early one morning my friend and I set out on the fifty-mile drive.

     While most of the cemetery is mowed, there is a section near the center that is completely overgrown with small, thorny trees and heavy brush.  I'm usually not deterred by that sort of thing when in pursuit of an ancestor's burial place, but this situation would have required a machete which I did not think to bring.  Next time!  You can see the jungle in the photo at the top of this page behind the large tree in the center. There are more graves to the left of that and behind it, so I'm pretty sure there are some inside the overgrown area as well.  There's also a view of the thicket in the picture below.

     One of the stones I most wanted to see was that of John McGarr, the brother of my third-great-grandfather Daniel McGarr.  Daniel never left Ireland, but John came to Auburn in the late 1830's where he opened a grocery and saloon.  In New York State's 1855 census, John stated he'd been in Auburn for seventeen years.  That would make his arrival year 1838, and though I've found those dates as given by the immigrants are often off by a few years, John married Mary Kelly at Holy Family Catholic Church in Auburn on 21 September of 1840, so an immigration date of 1838 is probably pretty close.  Luckily, we did locate Uncle John though his stone was in sorry shape like many of the other markers there.

The flag is for John's son Daniel, who died in the Civil War and is buried here

     We also found a few O'Hora stones, but most were so broken and eroded they were all but illegible.  Exploring the other side of the cemetery we noticed a path of sorts leading into a wooded area on its border.  No more than a few yards in we began seeing remnants of gravestones, some nearly intact.  Clearly the graveyard had extended into that area.  This was the point where I began feeling like I was in one of the You Tube videos, especially when that snake slithered under a fallen stone in front of me.  Unfortunately, none of the tombstones in that area could be read, but finding Uncle John made the trip a great success in my eyes.

     I snapped the photo below as we were leaving, while reflecting on the lives of the people who were laid to rest all about me.  They were driven from their country, endured a long, horrendous voyage across the North Atlantic by sail, and then battled prejudice and poverty to build a new life on these shores.  Only to end up here, in a slowly crumbling cemetery so far from home.  After all they'd been through, it seemed to me the least they deserved was to be remembered, if not a well-tended grave.