St. Mary's Cemetery: Crown, PA - Find A Grave Updates

On July 2, 2012 I visited the St. Mary's Cemetery in Crown, PA with my father and my aunt.  The Cemetery is adjacent to St. Mary's Church. On July 9, 2013 I visited the cemetery a second time with my Benjamin Norris, my 3rd cousin 2x removed. St. Mary’s Cemetery is the final resting place for some of the oldest ancestors in my family including Robert Haggerty and his wife Rebecca Easly (my 4^th great grandparents) and Michael McDonald and his wife Anna Haggerty (my 3^rd great grandparents). There are numerous other family members who were also laid to rest in the cemetery. Some of these individuals were highlighted in past blog posts - St. Mary's Cemetery: Crown, PA - McDonald Direct & Indirect Ancestors and St. Mary's Cemetery: Crown, PA - Haggerty Direct & Indirect Ancestors.

St. Mary's Cemetery

When I visited in 2012 I attempted to photograph as much of the old section of the cemetery as I could. The new section was quite large – in the new section I only photographed surnames in my family tree Haggerty, McDonald and O’Neill. The weather unfortunately did not cooperate. Many of photographs were taking in light rain while my father held an umbrella over my camera. At one point the light rain turned into a downpour and we had to stop and return later in the day.

It was my hope on that rainy day in July that I would one day share these photos. Over the years my family tree research has benefited from the work of volunteers. I have been fortunate to locate the grave sites of many family members on the Find A Grave website. All of those graves were documented and uploaded by volunteers. I wanted to be able to give back to the community which has been so helpful to me. It is also important to me that we preserve our history and properly remember our veterans. St. Mary’s Cemetery is the final resting place for several Civil War Soldiers and numerous WWII military veterans.

Over the past few weeks I started a small project with the goal of sharing the photos of St. Mary’s Cemetery.  The photos were cleaned and enhanced if needed to better view the tombstone markers. The photos were then labeled and populated with meta data. The final step was to upload these photos to the corresponding records for St. Mary’s Cemetery at the Find A Grave Website. If the family members are in my tree I have also incorporated the photos into my ancestry.com tree.

All of the photos with exception of two which had tombstones that were unreadable were uploaded. The cemetery features several family plots with a large common stone and individual headstones. In these cases the common stone is also uploaded to each individual headstone.

I am pleased to announce that 123 photos were added to St. Mary’s Cemetery. When I started the cemetery was approximately 18% photographed. Today the cemetery is approximately 28% photographed. Additionally six additional memorials were added to this cemetery.

As I uploaded photos I also updated some of the existing memorials. Through my research I was aware of many relationships between family members. In some cases parents are now linked to children – in others spouses with separate grave markers are linked to each other.  Maiden names have also been added to the memorials for women when known.

Photographs of tombstones of Veterans include:

• Civil War Soldier Andrew McDonald   
• Civil War Solider James McDonald 
• WWII Aloysius McCloskey 
• WWII John Paul McCloskey,Sr 
• WWII and Korea - Joseph A McCloskey 
• WWII Veteran Benjamin Ragan Norris
• WWII Veteran Barbara Lynam Norris
• WWII Henry J. O'Neill - 

My hope is that these updates to the St. Mary’s Cemetery will benefit other researchers in time.