Did they move the bodies?

Autumn is my favorite season for photographing gravestones because of the lush colors.

(For neglected cemeteries, the opportune season is at the end of winter, after the snow has melted, and before new growth has started.)

Today I visited a cemetery that I first read about years ago in an issue of Weird NJ: Your travel guide to New Jersey's local legends and best kept secrets.  The cemetery is unique enough for mention in the magazine (now online) because a parking lot was built around the burial site.

Now that I found this cemetery, I have more questions.

I didn't want to post about a cemetery on Halloween (October 31), even though cemeteries are my thing year-round.

"Mary Ellis Burial Site" is the name of this family cemetery on Find A Grave.  It is located near the Raritan River off US Route 1 in New Brunswick, Middlesex County, New Jersey.  Apparently the people who owned the land in the 1800s used this parcel for burials.  The owners and purpose of the land changed over the years, but the burials were preserved.  As the area became more commercially developed, the land was regraded, so the cemetery now sits above the parking lot.  Or at least a gravestone sits atop this pile of dirt, neatly encased in stone.

The story is that Mary Ellis, unmarried, purchased this piece of elevated land overlooking the Raritan River to pine away for a lost love, a sea captain who promised to sail back to her.  Mary died in 1828 according to the the photograph of the gravestone in the Weird NJ article.  New Jersey does not have death certificates from that time period.  Some New Brunswick newspapers are digitized online.  Mary's death appears in the Fredonian from January 14, 1829 on a list of people who died the prior year.  Mary Ellis died February 17, 1828, aged 77 years.  This is consistent with the Mary Ellis from the gravestone, born 1750.

Seven people appear on the list of those buried in this family plot.  You can read their names on the Find A Grave page for the cemetery or on the Wikipedia page.  I'm not a fan of regurgitating online lists.  I could only see the name Mildred Moody (1746-1816) on the one visible stone.

Margaret Ellis (1767-1850), wife of General Anthony Walton White (1750-1803), may have been a sister of Mary Ellis.  Or daughter, but this ruins the love story.

The horse of the sea captain is also buried in this plot, according to the story.

I found notices in newspapers from 1822, six years before Mary Ellis died.  Mary Ellis and Margaret White, likely the people buried in this family cemetery, lost their land to auction "at the suits of John Clark, Thomas Clark, William Clark, Peter Overt, Sarah Voorhees, and others."  I don't know the nature of these suits, or where these parcels of land were, other than in New Brunswick and adjoining the land of Abraham Potts.

Does this preserved mound of dirt actually contain the coffins and the horse?  Or was the remaining stone moved and future generations assumed the bodies were below?

If anyone has done research into this family and their land, please let us know.

DNA from Morris County, New Jersey: Family Tree DNA

At FamilyTreeDNA, my uncles share a segment on chromosome 1 with two individuals.

We need to know if these two DNA cousins match each other in the same spot.  FamilyTreeDNA does not allow you to make this comparison.  One of the cousins checked on his end, and sure enough, he matches this other cousin on the same segment.

Common ancestors of all of us were Richard/Dirk Vanderhoof (b 1745) and Catrina Young/Jong (b 1753).  My line descends from Dirk and Catrina's son, Jacob Vanderhoof (1774-1847) and then granddaughter, Elizabeth Vanderhoof (1799-1878).  The cousin in blue in the first graph is also descended from Jacob Vanderhoof, but through Jacob's son, Peter Vanderhoof (1797-1847).

The cousin in orange descends from Dirk and Catrina's daughter, Elizabeth Vanderhoof (b1775).  She married John Taylor.

But that's not all.

The cousin in orange also descends from Frederick DeMouth and Charlotte Muller/Miller.  For my line, they were the maternal grandparents of Ann Hopler (1772-1841) - wife of Jacob Vanderhoof (1774-1847).  If the other distant cousin on this segment (the "blue cousin") is not descended from DeMouth and Miller, then we can say that the DNA came from Vanderhoof and Young.  With the close geography and intermingling of these lines, we may not be able to sort out exactly whose DNA this is- just that it is from the Morris County lines.

DNA from Morris County, New Jersey: AncestryDNA/GedMatch

The next DNA cousins from Morris County, New Jersey appeared among my matches at AncestryDNA.  By comparing our attached family trees, Ancestry suggested that we share a set of ancestors, Jacob Vanderhoof (1772-1847) and Ann Hopler (1772-1841).  These cousins, like the ones in prior posts, are also descended from Jacob and Ann's son, Peter Vanderhoof (1797-1847), by his marriage to Rachel Peer (1800-1850).

The actual relationship, based on descent from Jacob Vanderhoof and Ann Hopler, is fourth cousins, once removed.

We can't see the shared segments at AncestryDNA, but these cousins fortunately uploaded to GedMatch.

My father shares five segments with one of the cousins, which is a great lead.

The amount and location of shared DNA among the other relatives varies.

We can triangulate the relation using the DNA of my father's brothers and their third cousin.  All three match this AncestryDNA cousin on chromosome 12.  (This segment immediately follows the segment shared by the DNA cousins from yesterday's post.)  The branch of my father's tree common to him and his third cousin holds Jacob Vanderhoof and Ann Hopler, the predicted Most Recent Common Ancestors.

We are presented with the same issue here as with the other cousins who are descendants of the couple Peter Vanderhoof and Rachel Peer:  Are we also related through the Peer line?  More research will hopefully produce the ancestry of Rachel Peer.