A couple of STillwell phone exchange sightings yesterday helped add to my continuing collection of Telephone Exchange Name Sightings.

Under the shadows of the Long Island Expressway the O’Loughlin Florist and the Riley Brothers Monuments company sit next to Second Calvary Cemetery and across the street from Third Calvary. Also across the street is the Natale Monuments company. The Riley Bros. and Natale names are seen all around Calvary and other NYC burial grounds. These companies make the tombstones and the mausoleums, and in many cases their company name is advertised somewhere on the structure. Riley Bros. and Natale outlasted the Draddy Brothers, my favorite funerary artists who built the Soldiers Monument at First Calvary and the Civil War Memorial at Battle Hill in Brooklyn.

I went out to New Calvary this weekend, helping some new friends from far away put together pieces of a family tree. I used to do cemetery photography more often but I unplugged from that activity after a couple of years and some sketchy encounters. Family tree-tracers and other sorts of forensic genealogists would contact me, seeking photos of their ancestors’ grave sites. Tomb stone inscriptions often contain information unrecorded anywhere else, and I have some happy memories of sending photos to people who said it changed their understanding of their heritage.

At first I did it for the personal satisfaction of making these seemingly impossible connections for people, but I soon discovered quite a bit of demand for what I was doing. I could not justify spending so many hours at this for free so I asked for a small fee to cover my time and effort. No one ever paid me. Well, a few people did, but for the most part the genealogists’ promises of payment all went unfulfilled, and I had to give up on the endeavor. It was not for lack of interest on my part, nor was it for unsated greed, but simply for my inability to justify the time commitment against other pursuits. Nevertheless, when someone contacts me directly (as happened this weekend) then I find it hard to refuse those requests. I just love doing it.

Some months ago I started a Weekly Grave, in which I transcribe (as best I can) the inscriptions on a randomly chosen grave stone that I photographed. I have hundreds upon hundreds of these photos, mostly from Calvary but also from other yards in New York and in some other states. Originally I took these pictures for my own use, with the intent of researching the names on the Network when I got home. I have done that and once in a while I learned something interesting. As I described to a friend this weekend, I have learned a lot about New York from following through on names and families I spotted at Calvary.

But few names on the stones have any public record of which to speak, and for me the more interesting pursuit is in recording those names and making available on the Network whatever information could be gleaned from the grave stone inscriptions. I have had wonderful successes at randomly connecting people to their past in this way, but the pursuit is strictly hit-or-miss.

In early 2006 I found a suicide note in this field at Third Calvary.

Third Calvary

There is no way to connect its author to the intended recipient, who I assume is dead. I picked the note up from the grass and as I read it I felt something smear over inside me. Remembering the note this weekend reminded me that I never saw my father’s suicide note. A police investigator read parts of it to me over the phone but I never thought to ask to see it. I think of it now. The only line I remember now is “I will not live like a vegetable.” The note must still be on file, with the gun he used and who knows what other “evidence.” What I remember of the note, from what I heard on the phone, sounded like vintage dad-speak. But maybe there was more confidence in it. More steel. Dad was a simple man and I would expect no poetry or introspection from him even at the signature moment of his life, but I think I should see his statement, in his handwriting.