Paying Our Respects in the Potter's Field

Having paid our respects to Dagmar at the Riverside Columbarium, we had a wonderful dinner on the upper West Side with our son, Jake, and one of my oldest and dearest friends who lives on the Upper West Side. We then retired to our digs in Stuyvesant Town for the evening.

In closing out the evening, I had mentioned to our son, who lives in Williamsburg, that we were planning to drive out to Long Island to pay our respects to Jane's grandmother (and his great-grandmother) Audrey McCabe Ralston, who had been buried in a potter's field near Mt. Sinai, NY. In planning for this trip, I had learned that the train ride (LIRR) was about two hours one-way, plus we would have to rent a car or take a cab from the Port Jefferson terminus to drive to the eight-plus miles cemetery where Audrey is buried. So I had decided to simply rent a car in Manhattan so we could dispense with the train, etc., and have a nice excursion exploring parts of Long Island Jane and I had not seen.

Whereupon Jake protested and offered us the loan of a vehicle for the day—not his, to be sure, but his roommate's. It was a generous offer and we gratefully accepted it.

Paying Our Respects at the Riverside Columbarium

A second mission in our trip to New York City was to pay our respects to the McCabe sisters: Jane's grandmother Audrey (our Socialist cheesecake), and Audrey's younger sister, Dagmar. It seems a long time ago that I wrote about the unexpected appearance of a member of Dagmar's family. Audrey had been born in 1898 and Dagmar in 1900, both in the San Juan Hill section of Manhattan. But because I was most interested in Jane's line, I simply never followed up on the two references I had seen in the 1900 and 1910 federal censuses to the younger sister—especially given how mangled the spelling of the younger sister's name apparently was. I mean, "Degnan" for "Dagmar"?

The appearance of one of Dagmar's descendants changed all that. Dagmar had lived a long, full and apparently happy life in New York City and had two daughters who were both accomplished in their fields.