ROOTS & BRANCHES

Every inactive cemetery should have someone as interested in the people who are or were buried there as Joseph F. Harrison III is about the St. Stephen’s Catholic Cemetery in the Nicetown section of Philadelphia.

Harrison has family connections to St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church—his father was baptized there in 1925—as well as a great-great-grandmother named Ellen Neely Kenney who was buried there in 1877.

He put together a first edition of a book about the cemetery in 2004 but his research continued as received a dramatic boost in 2008 when Ancestry.com went online with the collection “Pennsylvania, Philadelphia City Death Certificates, 1803-1915.”

This allowed Harrison, in a second edition of his work published earlier this year, to effectively reconstruct a burial register for St. Stephen’s Cemetery of about 2,000 individuals laid to rest in this burial ground. While he used other sources such as newspaper obituaries, too, Harrison says the greatest number of entries came from the city death records.

This supplements a burial map of cemetery lot owners that he had for the first edition of the book (Harrison’s persistence obtained a better version of this for the second edition). Harrison has closeups of each section of the cemetery as well as an index to the names listed on the map.

Harrison also includes a wealth of other information about St. Stephen’s and the people of the church: a history of the parish that gave the cemetery its name; a listing of Civil War soldiers buried there; some accidental, violent and unusual deaths; results of a ground-penetrating radar survey (equivocal as far as determining the number of burials), deeds pertaining to the cemetery and newspaper articles about the closing of the cemetery in 1891.

Some people have told Harrison that they believed the bodies of those buried in St. Stephen’s have been moved. He concludes that while there’s no proof of a mass reburial from the cemetery, some folks after the cemetery was closed may have had individual family members reburied to any burying ground where they could later be buried together.

As I said at the beginning of this column, every inactive cemetery ought to have a guardian angel such as Joe Harrison looking out for it! I have never seen such a complete volume that covers a cemetery from every conceivable historical angle!

St. Stephen’s Catholic Cemetery in the Nicetown Section of Philadelphia, PA, second edition, is available on Amazon.com as a perfect-bound, 170-page book (including some full-color photos and maps) for $22.95.