Only a first name…

Some of the most poignant grave markers I see are the ones that contain only single first names. Cemetery visitors know the ones I am talking about. They’re not individual head or foot stones around a bigger family monument. They may have an association with a nearby family plot, but it’s not possible to identify which one anymore. They don’t “match” in style or decoration the monuments that surround them. They are alone, even as they sit among their fellow dead in the cemetery.

Gertrude’s zinc monument sits in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland.

In another section not too far away, Laura’s monument sits perched on the edge of her section, just before the ground drops away.

The thing that makes these monuments call out to me is their very mystery. We don’t know anything about the person buried there. Were these two women mere infants or elderly great-grandmothers when they died? Were their lives cut off by accident, disease, violence, or did they simply succumb to old age? Are they buried under merely their names because no one cared enough to record more, or because the family was so bereaved that it was all they could manage?

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Celtic crosses at Lakeview

Another edition of our Celtic crosses’ series, and we’re still visiting Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland. The ones I have today are carved as decoration into a larger monument, rather than standing alone.

The first Celtic cross I want to showcase is for Edward Stager Wright. I’ve actually found this name online as the author of a book on traveling called Westward Round the World, but I’m trying to confirm that this marker is for that writer.

One of the challenging things about cemetery photography is that you can sometimes come home with photographs with insufficient identifying information. Maybe you meant to photograph the monument from a different angle and got distracted, or maybe that blurred photograph that you deleted was the different angle, but it all comes back to a photograph lacking information. So here’s a lovely carved Celtic cross in a family’s monument at Lakeview:

Albert Lee Withington was a book collector. In 1892, he was the treasurer of the fledgling Book Fellowes that became the Rowfant Club (Kent, Lancour, and Daily, The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, volume 39).

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