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.

The next day, as the cliché goes, dawned bright and sunny. We made our way on the LL Canarsie line at 1st Avenue and 14th St. (it will always be the double-L to me) and headed over to Williamsburg to pick up the car. I had been a bit concerned about traffic, but hopeful nevertheless, as I expected that the morning rush-hour traffic would largely in-bound, while we were headed out in the direction of central Long Island.

No matter: the highways were dismally clogged, particularly the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which is apparently being rebuilt or widened or maybe both. Jane's navigational gadget took us around a big backup on the Long Island Expressway (LIE), although it meant taking a tour past LaGuardia Airport and then back down to the LIE in Flushing Meadows. It was nice to see the old World's Fair site again, including the tower that was a starship in disguise in Men in Black.

Traffic began to calm itself a bit as we got away from the city, so we started to look at the countryside. Countryside? What countryside? There isn't much in the way of scenery in this part of Long Island, but there is surprisingly enough a hill or two, with the highest one rising to about 400 ft. As we left the LIE and headed north towards Washington Memorial Park Cemetery (Mt. Sinai, NY), we crossed one. Geologically, it's a moraine: a pile of rocks pushed ahead of a glacier as it bulldozed its way south, presumably during the last Ice Age. When the warmth returned and the glacier melted, the rocks didn't, and presto: instant hill. We crossed Long Island's central moraine while driving north on Patchogue-Mt. Sinai Rd.

The cemetery itself is about as far out into the countryside as you can get in this part of Long Island, which is to say "not very far." Still, it is well-kept and quiet: beautiful, in a word.




We stopped at the office to inquire about the location of Audrey's grave. Someone who spends an alarming amount of time in a tanning booth was nevertheless very helpful: "McKinley, 1st Lane, Plot 170-D." That's the Potter's Field and it's about where the small black dot is at the right of the image below.

It took a bit of searching until I realized that the graves were pretty much in chronological order, with the rows back nearest the fence being the most recent. That meant that Audrey's final resting place was nearer the road. And it wasn't long at all until we found it. Jane took a picture of the marker we had had placed:

Audrey McCabe Ralston
1898-1991
Washington Memorial Park Cemetery
Mt. Sinai, NY

It was cold. It was windy. We did not stay long, only long enough to know that we had completed this part of our pilgrimage. We climbed back into the car and headed back toward the city.

Doing so meant climbing back over that moraine that I mentioned earlier. When we were headed northbound, there was no view from the top; but when we came back southbound, suddenly the Great South Bay, Fire Island, and then the Atlantic Ocean stretched out before us under a bluebird sky. What an unexpected and wonderful sight—and then it was gone in a heartbeat as we dropped back down the the flatland.

The trip back to the City seemed, well, daunting, because we had seen all the construction backups on both the Long Island Expressway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But I had an idea: Jane's great-great-grandmother, Rebecca Thorne Howard, had moved to NYC around the same time as had Jane's great-grandmother (Rebecca's daughter), Valeria Howard Ralston Wilcoxson. Valeria had come from Savannah, GA, with her two children, one of whom was George Ralston, Jane's grandfather and the husband of our socialist cheesecake, Audrey McCabe Ralston. Here is a look at this part of Jane's family tree again. Jane's mother's name highlighted in blue, and Rebecca Thorne Howard is at the far right:

Jane's mother, maternal grandfather, great-grandparents, and
one set of great-great-grandparents.

Of course you remember that when I finally found Valeria in New York City, her two children were listed in the 1910 federal census as "lodgers." But there was a third lodger listed who was named "Rebecca Hubbard," age 54, and who was also born in South Carolina. I had no clue who she was.

But the more census sheets I looked at, the more apparent misunderstandings and downright errors by census takers that I saw. Suddenly, a hunch hit me about "Rebecca Hubbard": could she actually be Valeria's mother, Rebecca Howard? Could it be that this was just another mishearing by another census taker?

I began to pore over the New York City death records and, sure enough, turned up a Rebecca Howard who died in 1916 in New York City. I ordered a copy of her death certificate and there she was. The census had noted she was born in South Carolina, but the clincher from the death certificate was that her parents were identified as Philip Thorne and Elizabeth Weston.

Death certificate for Jane's great-great-grandmother, Rebecca Thorne Howard

Rebecca's husband, Robert Howard, Jr., had died in 1886 in Charleston. Valeria might still have been at their home at 9 Henrietta when her father died, as she did not marry George Ralston in Savannah until 1892. Valeria apparently returned to 9 Henrietta to give birth to Jane's grandfather, George, and then went back to her husband in Savannah, where she bore a daughter. They lived in Savannah until around 1906, when she took the children and moved to New York, leaving her husband in Savannah.

Rebecca's death certificate says that she lived in NYC for 11 years before she died, which puts her arrival around 1905. As it turns out, Rebecca's older brother, Weston Thorne, had moved from Charleston to New York City around 1870. The 1880 federal census shows him and his family living in lower Manhattan at 185 Bleecker St. His occupation: cigar maker.

Weston passed away in 1905, so it is possible that Rebecca, who was a widow herself, moved to NYC to help her sister-in-law, Letitia Plumeau Thorne, with their family—although Weston and Letitia's children were no longer in school. Of course, it is also possible that Rebecca moved to New York along with her daughter, Valeria, and her grandchildren, and the length of her stay in NYC that is recorded on her death certificate is just an estimate.

Having said all that, here was my plan: if you look at the bottom right corner of Rebecca Howard's death certificate, you'll notice that it says she was buried in the Cypress Hills Cemetery, which is on the boundary between Brooklyn and Queens not far from JFK Airport—considerably south of the clogged freeways. Going back to Williamsburg via the Cypress Hills Cemetery would enable us to miss all that construction and all those backups. What's not to like about that?



So we headed back toward the city, but switched over from the LIE to the Northern State Parkway, which became the Grand Central Parkway, which we followed until we peeled off onto the Jackie Robinson Parkway, which, as it turns out, runs right through Cypress Hills Cemetery.

Cypress Hills is one of many cemeteries that are all cheek-by-jowl, as it were, in this part of Brooklyn and Queens: there's The Evergreen, Trinity, Knollwood, Mt. Judah, Machpelah, Mt. Neboh, Mt. Carmel and Mt. Hope. Harry Houdini is buried here and so is Eubie Blake.

The offices for Cypress Hills are in Brooklyn (near the Cypress Hills station on the J train), but the majority of the cemetery is in Queens—not that it matters. Once again, the cemetery staff were most gracious and helpful. Carol, although her given name is Carolina, pulled out the old ledger book which is organized by date and found "Rebecca E. Howard" right where she should have been on the pages for August, 1916. She was buried in Section 11 (St. Phillips) Lot 100, Grave 314. The ledger didn't mention whether there was a grave marker, but Carolina told us that if we have trouble finding it, just call the office and they will send out a supervisor to help us locate it.

So off we went, winding around the hills of Cypress Hills. Acres and acres of headstones. Many, many Chinese names. We passed Eubie Blake's grave. He's Baltimore's own; how did he come to be buried here? We also passed Arturo Schomburg's grave: he donated his collection of books, manuscripts, and paintings to the New York Public Library, and in return, they named the Harlem branch of the NYPL after him: the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. That's where we had been the day yesterday, looking at socialist cheesecake.

When we finally figured out where Section 11 was, we parked, got out and started to look around.  It was still cold. It was still windy. It was dismaying. Although many of the headstones were engraved with the section, lot, and grave numbers, they didn't appear to be in order, which is a polite way of saying that things were pretty messed up. We walked about a few times, making no sense of it, and then I put in a call back to the office to ask for help. My timing was perfect: "Oh, they're at lunch now...." Wah!!!

We took that as a sign from the heavens that our searching was over for the day—besides, we hadn't had lunch yet either. Before we had left the office, we asked for recommendations for lunch. After we had heard the list of fast food and pizza places, Carolina said, "You could try the Glendale Diner. It's on Myrtle Avenue." Myrtle Avenue was on the other side of the cemetery from the office, but, as it turned out, Section 11 was much closer to Myrtle Avenue than it was to the office, so it all worked out. The Glendale Diner was a real diner—you know, the kind with a huge menu with laminated pages and pictures of the food on the pages. Jane got a feta cheese omelet and I got real diner food: a hot beef sandwich with canned peas and carrots.

After filling ourselves with food and our borrowed car with gas, we wound our way through the back streets of Brooklyn back to Williamsburg, where we were to drop off the car. Of course, there was no parking near Jake's apartment. We drove around the block several times, and finally called him to see what he might know about places to park. He suggested looking on a street several blocks over from where we were, so we went over there and were amazed by how much parking was available. We parked the car and headed for the LL train to go back to our temporary digs in Stuyvesant Town.

What a day it had been. The trip to Washington Memorial Park had been been the right thing to do, and so was the idea of coming back via Cypress Hills. We saw parts of Long Island, Brooklyn, and Queens that we would have otherwise never even thought to visit, plus we got to pay our respects to Jane's grandmother, who, so far as we know, died alone and unacknowledged by her family.

As it turned out, the day wasn't over yet—in fact, it took another day for it to be over. We made it back to Washington where it was starting to snow. Then Jake called to tell us that the wonderfully empty side of the street where we had parked his roommate's car was a tow-away zone, which was why it was so amazingly empty. We never saw the signs, even though we had passed up other parking places earlier precisely because of the "tow-away zone" signs.

After a mad scramble by Jake and his roommate to find the car—had it been stolen, towed, or what?—and a day or so of acute embarrassment for us, they located the car at the police impoundment lot at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They got it home just in time for the great January blizzard. Of course we paid all the fines and fees, including their Uber fare to the impoundment lot. And to think I was worried about spending $80 to rent a car when I could spend a little over five times that much to borrow one.

We still can't figure out how we missed those signs.