Going up

Anyone who has walked a 19th century cemetery has seen the single upright hand with three fingers and thumb folded down on the palm while the pointer finger gestures straight up, like on the tombstone for Kezia Edwards in Doty Settlement Cemetery. Just a few tombstones away, Nathanial Moore is remembered with the same symbol.

The hand, and specifically the outstretched finger, are a representation of the soul ascending to heaven. The example below is from the Olde Hudson Township Burying Ground.

Unfortunately, like other relatively thin pieces of cemetery sculpture, that outstretched finger sometimes gets damaged or broken off. The finger on Isaac Weakley’s stone in Old Carlisle Burying Ground seems awfully stubby.

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Doty Settlement Cemetery

The second cemetery my friends and I visited this weekend was another one that suffers from an unclear name. Although the sign along Brown Road north and slightly west of Oxford, Ohio, identifies the cemetery as Oxford Township Cemetery, the Oxford Museum Association that cares for the property calls it the Doty Settlement Cemetery. The Doty Settlement is simply a name that was given to the group of farmsteads in the local area because a number of the farmers bore the surname Doty. The grounds we visited are a historic site where the meetinghouse (church) and cemetery were located.

The cemetery is tiny. There is a little iron fence to show where the meetinghouse was, and the cemetery is marked out by the same charming iron work. The historical marker on the site estimates that there could have been as many as 100 burials during the time the cemetery was active from approximately 1843 to 1934. There are approximately 25 readable tombstones still standing, although there are broken bases to testify that there were once several more. Two veterans in the cemetery, William S. Moore (Civil War) and Culla Jay Moore (World War I), have relatively new United States military headstones.


After I returned home, I was delighted to find that the Oxford Museum Association has a very nice website that includes historical information on the cemetery. Most exciting for me, the website does include a page called “Those Buried Here,” listing information on those they know rest here, including details like relationship to others buried in the cemetery, occupation, and cause of death.

I’ll leave you now the monument to a young woman who shared the beautiful but now unusual (at least in the United States) name of Kezia with her mother.

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