Little Mary WILLIAMS

Little Mary WILLIAMS, a photo by midgefrazel on Flickr.

photo by Frederick E. Burdick, used with permission, all rights reserved.

Epitaph Week

"This lovely bud so young and fair, called hence by early doom, just came to show how sweet a flower in Paradise might bloom."

Recently, while browsing through the listing of gravestones in Grace Denison Wheeler's book, "Old Homes of Stonington" published in 1903, I thought how amazing it is that I have so much information about the people buried in the Whitehall Cemetery (#21) in Mystic, CT. 

Town Historian, Fred Burdick, spent weeks cataloging and photographing this important cemetery and publishing them on CD. He has given his permission for me to blog about them. I have taken photographs in the cemetery but none of mine are as good as his! He even gave me his spreadsheet map of the locations of the gravestones. His goal is the photograph and preserve the rich history of the Town of Stonington, Connecticut.

Little Mary, daughter of Sanford and Polly Williams died on 3 June 1836. She was four years, four months and 22 days old. I can't imagine the heartbreak of losing a little child. Her brothers are also buried in this cemetery.

I often try to read the epitaphs on my family gravestones but they are either underground or can no longer be read. Some of my husband's Parmenter family gravestones have completely different types of epitaphs. Like the type of stone, the carving of the letters and the placement of the grave, it is important to try and read the message given.

The Free Dictionary defines epitath as a "phrase or statement written in memory of a person especially on a tombstone."