Brookdale Reformed Churchyard

The Autumn tour of cemeteries continues.

For the first time I visited a graveyard by Brookdale Park in Bloomfield [Essex County, New Jersey, USA], currently bearing the name Brookdale Reformed Churchyard.  The trees were lovely and the stones old.  Several burials dated from the early 1800s.  I am recognizing the same family names as I travel to local cemeteries:  Garrabrant, Post, Sigler, VanGiesen, VanWinkle.

The stone for Leah, wife of John Egbertson (1772-1830), is so faded that I could barely read it.  The year is not legible any more.

A member of the church kindly showed me around and explained some of the work done over the years.  The church was originally called Stone House Plains and was Dutch Reformed.  Some records exist at the Bloomfield Public Library.

I took a close-up of what remains of the etching on Leah's stone to virtually preserve it for the foreseeable future.  Please read Amy Johnson Crow's article, Five Photos You Should Take at the Cemetery.  Digital photos are so easy to take on our phones.  Your pictures of close, near, and far will aid future researchers in reading the stones and locating the stones later.

Researching this cemetery at home, with great delight I found digitized, online copies of records for this cemetery through the Bloomfield Public Library's Special Collections.  Included is a map and a compilation of gravestone inscriptions by Herbert A Fisher, Jr.

Many other records pertaining to Bloomfield are also in this online collection, so if you are researching this area of the world, this is worth a look.  City directories as early as 1870 are here.

Leaves and Stones

More autumn pictures.  These stones are in the First Presbyterian Churchyard in Morristown, Morris County, New Jersey.  I will need to re-visit the cemetery.  This plot was filled with leaves, obscuring some stones.

The center stone in the front row is Susannah Scofield (died 1852), wife of William Bishop (died 1844), originally from Connecticut.  The other four stones are for their children, Charles, George, Darius, Hannah.  Readable images of the individual stones are on Find A Grave.  I wanted to see if these stones were together to solidify a family connection, which indeed they are a family.

My Bishop line hails from Morris County.  The earliest Bishop I've traced is Reuben Bishop, who died in 1856 in Morristown.  He was married to Susan Ayres (1817-1890).

I descend from a son of Reuben Bishop and Susan Ayers, William Bishop (1843-1915).  In the 1850 census, William is listed as Reuben.  Future records give his name as "William" or "William R."

Is there a connection between my William Reuben Bishop from Morris County, New Jersey and the William Bishop who moved from Connecticut to New Jersey?  Still working on it . . .

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.