Cheesy Grits: Valeria's Final Resting Place

As I mentioned earlier, the death certificate for Jane's great-grandmother Valeria was a great find because it had so much information about her. One of the final pieces of information was the place where she was buried: Flushing Cemetery. So it seemed a reasonable thing to see if we couldn't find her grave—after all, to this point, we had so few actual tangible signs of this part of Jane and Jake's ancestry.

I contacted the main office at the Flushing Cemetery (old style, FLushing 9-0100; new style, (718)359-0100) and the young woman there was quite helpful, confirming that Valeria Wilcoxson was indeed buried there. As it turns out, many people go to cemeteries looking for graves and headstones.



It was one of those bellowing hot days in New York City and I was finding my way down down down underneath Grand Central Station in search of the Number 7 Flushing Line. The further down I went, the hotter it got. I started hearing loud mechanical clanking and banging and began to think I was in Scene 2 of Das Rheingold and was descending with Wotan into Nibelheim and we were hearing the enslaved dwarves hammering away on their anvils.

No Nibelheim: just the #7 Line. In the years since I lived in New York City, most of the subway trains have been air-conditioned, which, while making the inside of the cars cooler, serves to make the indoor stations much hotter. After all, the heat that is being removed from the inside of the cars is being dumped, with great and noisy fanfare of fans, outside. And never mind if "outside" is still enclosed in a subway stop deep underground. It was hot down there; almost too hot to breathe.

It's quite a long ride out to Main Street in Flushing, although soon after you enter Queens, the tracks go above ground and you can at least see around you. That said, it must not have been much to look at because I remember none of it. I do remember that Main Street in Flushing was very crowded, but I wasn't there to shop or admire the ethnic diversity of the shops on Main Street. It was so hot and the sun was so bright as to make that kind of mid-day exploration wearisome anyway. I hailed a cab for the 2+ mile ride from the end of the #7 Line to the Flushing Cemetery, which is at 16306 46th Avenue, near 163nd St.

Seventy-five acres in the middle of Flushing, the Flushing Cemetery was established in 1853. Lots of famous people buried there, from Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong and John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie to Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and Bernard Baruch, advisor to presidents Wilson and Roosevelt. And Valeria Thorne Howard Ralston Wilcoxson.

The ever-helpful staff—I thought I had jotted down the name of the person who helped me, but I can't find it—gave me a map of the cemetery with explicit directions for finding her headstone: Grave 1076 in Section R, alongside 46th Avenue. And there she was:

Jane's great-grandmother
Valeria Thorne Howard Ralston Wilcoxson
born July 8, 1876 in Charleston, SC
died June 29, 1974, Queens, NY.

As an afterthought, I looked again at her death certificate to see who had supplied Valeria's information for the record. Under "Signature of Informant," I read "Christina Rougeau"; under "Relationship to deceased," I read "Daughter."

Say what?! I thought Valeria's daughter was named "Mirtle," or "Myrtle." That's certainly what had been recorded repeatedly in the census. Who is this "Christina Rougeau" person?