Holy Name Cemetery in Jersey City, New Jersey

If you had Catholic family living in Hudson County, New Jersey, or even New York City, in the late 1800s through the 1900s, you need to check the burial records for Holy Name Cemetery.  Older death certificates refer to this cemetery as “Hudson CCC” or “HCCC,” which stood for Hudson County Catholic Cemetery.

Barely legible, this death certificate from 1893 indicates burial at Hudson County Catholic Cemetery, now known as Holy Name Cemetery, in Jersey City.

According to interment.com, there are over 264,000 burials at Holy Name.  You can view close to 20,000 of these burials at FindAGrave.com.  Plot cards are available on microfilm through your local family history center.

The cemetery is well maintained with an office on site, active groundskeepers, and current burials.  Locating a plot can be confusing because several sections seem to have the same lettering system.  This could be because more than one cemetery originally occupied the grounds now called Holy Name.  (If anyone wants to send me a reliable link about this, please do.)  I found a detailed map on one of the microfilm rolls that is useful in determining the correct section.



Map of Holy Name Cemetery, Jersey City, New Jersey

Partial listing of burials for Catherine O'Donnell at Holy Name Cemetery, Jersey City.  FHL #1412638.

 

In the above listing, the women named Catherine O’Donnell in plots A E 79, M 65 A, A 458 No, and 6 A 129 are not buried with or near one another.  You can imagine how confusing this becomes.

After discovering your plot of interest, the next step is to look up all burials in that specific plot.  Using the Catherine O’Donnell buried in grave A E 79 in 1921, we can find additional burials not named O’Donnell, as well as the grave owner.  We find that a woman named Mary Lee, age 58, was buried in the plot in 1876, as well as a baby named George Bundschub in 1877.  The owner was Edward O’Donnell.  Finding out all of the burials in a plot, even if they do not share the last name of your original inquiry, is necessary to map out a family.

Good luck using the above map to locate the grave!

O'Donnell plot at Holy Name Cemetery, Jersey City.  Section G, row 10, plots 29 and 30.
The stones in the far background are in a circle for priests and nuns.
Picture taken 30 May 2007 by J. Lutter.

Map provided at the office of Holy Name Cemetery to find the above O'Donnell plot.

Three Hours

Fannie Duryea and Abraham Lent Brewer were married in the 1840s and had no known children.  They lived in New York City and then Rockland County, New York.  They both died in 1901.  Fannie left her estate to Abraham, but he died before she wrote a new will, so her estate passed intestate to her surviving sister and nieces and nephews.  The disposition of her estate solidified many of these suspected family lines.

I recently discovered that Abraham founded a fire department in Monsey, New York.  (You can read the post here.)  In spite of his local fame because of his contributions, I have yet to find an obituary for Abraham.  I decided to widen my search and found a notice of the deaths of Abraham and Fannie- in Georgia of all places.  They have no connection to Georgia, so I never thought to look there for information.

The Augusta Chronicle, Augusta, Georgia, 1 May 1901, page 4.
Retrieved from genealogybank.com.

Fannie died at 3 a.m. on 28 April 1901.  If Abraham died before her, but on the same day, he had only a three hour time span.  This quirk enabled me, one hundred years later, to map out her family lines.  Had Abraham died just a few hours later, I may still not have such a clear mapping of Fannie's lines.

Certificate and Record of Death for Fannie M. Brewer,
died 28 April 1901 in Ramapo, Rockland County, New York.

Even on Fannie's death certificate, she is listed as widowed.  I never suspected she was a widow for only a few hours.

Two Deaths on Christmas

A recent study finds that Americans are more likely to die on Christmas Day, December 25th, than any other day of the year.  (You can read an article about the study here.)  This conclusion was based on analysis of death certificates from 1979-2004.

I have uncovered two deaths on December 25th, several years before the deaths studied.  (It would be interesting if someone expanded on this study and included deaths in the 1800s through the present.  Perhaps the commercialization of Christmas and the added stress increases deaths on December 25th.)

Stephen C. Duryea died on December 25, 1893 in Jersey City.  He was 21 years old, unmarried, and died of pneumonia.  He was the 7th of 12 children and the 5th to die.  This must have been a very difficult time for his mother, especially since his father died six years earlier.  I discovered Stephen's death date upon finding the family plot at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, Westchester County, New York.

Jacob Duryea died on December 25, 1899.  His death took a while to uncover.  He appeared in the 1880 census in Hoboken.  His wife appeared without him, widowed, in the 1900 census.  At a local family history center, I searched microfilm rolls of death indexes year by year, starting in 1880.  On the last possible roll was Jacob's death.  He was buried at Hoboken Cemetery.  I visited his grave to find a bunch of family members buried with him.  The stone had fallen, but right side up.

Hoboken Cemetery is not in Hoboken; it is in North Bergen, which is in Hudson County, not Bergen County.  There is a house by the entrance, but it does not contain a caretaker or records.  You may call Epstein Management for records at 201-867-0635.

More unknown photos

These photos aren't of people.  They are of land.  I'm hoping that someone will recognize the roller coaster and let me know where it is.  My grandfather took these photos, so I'm thinking that they are from the Jersey shore, Staten Island, or Long Island.  Thank you for looking.

Can anyone identify this roller coaster?

Where is this?

Family Tree Maker 2011, part two

Following up on my previous post concerning Family Tree Maker 2011 software, I have been alerted by Ancestry that there is a way to upload media from the software on your computer to the Ancestry.com website.

With the program on my computer, I can view media for an individual.  Media is of two basic types:  media images merged from Ancestry and images that I have added, usually of gravestones and vital records, such as death certificates.  Uploading the tree as a gedcom file produces a no frills version without any media images, but keeps names, dates, and locations.  I was manually uploading the visual media files.

There is an easy button for this situation.  It is the SHARE icon located in the upper right corner of the Family Tree Maker program.

Family Tree Maker 2011.  The media files viewable in the program do not transfer when exporting the records in creating a gedcom version of the tree.

After pressing the share icon, a few different boxes appear to guide you through sending the tree- along with the media images- to Ancestry.com.

Here is the result on ancestry.com for a small tree I uploaded to try this out.  This is the Haefeli family, originally from Switzerland, who came to Newark, Essex County, New Jersey, in the 1850s.  They are buried at Woodland Cemetery in Newark.

The picture of the gravestone in the media row is the one picture that I added for Franz.  The listings for residence next to the years are for census entries and tax lists.  Although "add media" appears with each listing, the media that I can view with the software is viewable online with two clicks.  Click on residence and you are brought to a new screen with the link to the media.

Click this source citation to see the media- the family of Francis Hafle in Newark in the 1860 census.