Thrills and Chills at the Family Graveyard

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

My family, or at least recent versions of it, includes many wanderers. As a result, the closest thing I have to a family cemetery, a repository of the human remains of most of my ancestors, is St. Joseph’s cemetery in Burlington, Vermont. I often think of these relatives, and their final resting place, in late October and early November as All Souls Day draws near.

Both of my parents descended from a long line of Irish Catholics who had left Ireland and settled in Vermont and other parts of New England, including New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New York. Besides O’Brien, the family tree includes such Irish surnames such as Sullivan, Leonard, McCarthy, Duffy, Doyle, Flaherty, Fitzgerald, Kennedy, Hogan, Lynch, Murphy, Killary, Halvey, Carroll, Barrett, Barron, and Cahill.

Most of them lived and died in Burlington. Living meant baptism, confession, communion, confirmation, marriage, and Sunday mass every week in Burlington’s lovely old stone Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The Cathedral, built in 1867, stood at the corner of St. Paul Street and Cherry Street until an arson fire destroyed it just over one hundred years later. Dying, of course, also meant a trip to the Cathedral, and then a final stop at St. Joseph’s cemetery.

St. Joseph’s is a place of great character and great characters. It sits on a hill overlooking the city and Lake Champlain to its west, and is the oldest local Catholic boneyard, with interments starting there before the Civil War. The burial ground is a quaint, spooky, and classic graveyard. Its narrow dirt roads mark crooked paths between ghostly stone gates, mossy obelisks, decaying headstones, and decrepit markers of various shapes and sizes, many of them taller than me. During one visit when our children were younger, they were at first terrified by the place, but soon they were wandering around happily looking for family names on the tombstones. We found both my name and my nine-year-old son’s name on old markers.

The cemetery has over four thousand of Burlington’s dearly departed residents, mostly of Irish Catholic lineage. One of the Irish inhabitants is John Lonergan, a hero from the Battle of Gettysburg and a Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. Burlington’s other main Catholic population of French Canadians primarily are interred in their own segregated fashion, just across the street, in Mount Calvary Cemetery. In life as in death, the two largest Catholic groups exist, or no longer exist, in their own circles.

St. Joseph’s is the final resting place for three of my grandparents, three sets of great grandparents, three sets of my great, great grandparents, and numerous other aunts, uncles, cousins several times removed, and assorted other relatives. Mom’s mother, Catherine Sullivan Gleason, rests in the Leonard family plot of her mother, Kate Leonard Sullivan, who died in childbirth. When my mother passed away in 2007, we decided to bury her there too, near to her mother and grandmother. Catherine’s grave was not properly marked when she died in 1939, or perhaps the original marker has been lost. Thus, we put Mom’s name, and her mother’s name, together on the same grave marker.

I think Mom would have liked our decision to put her ashes in St. Joseph’s cemetery, with her family. The place has soul.