This is a fascinating inscription and burial, no less so because of its considerable vintage. I have no idea if external references would answer my questions thus, but would I be thinking correctly that 12-year-old Tryphena was the younger sister (as the infant Fitch would have died in infancy before she was born, per the dates mentioned) of the infant child of Nath(aniel?) and Margaret Lomiss? It suggests that the inscriptions were made close together, even though Tryphena and Fitch died roughly seventeen years apart; or even that the burial was elsewhere (or unmarked) before the final carved stone was put in place. Might it even be a simple memorial for one or the other, with no actual corporeal remains put in the ground for one or the other of the two siblings? I can't imagine, even two hundred-fifty years prior, that Fitch's body was left unburied for seventeen years before his sister was interred there.

Lastly, the grainy texture and distinct brownish tone of the headstone also looks like sandstone or another porous rock, as you've shown in other burials where quarrying such local stone was preferable for both working and availability in the New England of the area.

Thoroughly fascinating, GiC, and I hope you did not mind my not commenting on your photographic record for a while until now. I hope you and your family's Christmas was an excellent one, however you celebrated it!

-2Paw.

another little tragedy; the sister was born five years after her brother died.

It speaks volumes about mortality and the preciousness of life, when there were no antibiotics or hospitals or doctors, much less institutional and sustained treatment for diseases we might casually be referred for today. The calmness and acceptance of death (and life, fleeting or not) in the past, replaced with an almost blase sense of protecting the amount of life at the price of the quality of it, sometimes. I'd much rather such a child be nourished and healed to live a full life, I think...but sometimes either then or now, there is an ending that cannot be escaped, whether or not the life ended when that end was reached.

We do what we can, I think, and do what we can do. It's never as simple as 'There, but for the grace of God, go I..'. It becomes a question of what worth we ascribe to what we are, and what we have, because of or despite our limits. In the ground, then as now, there is the corpus delecti and the significance of what we were, and what becomes of us after that. It is the excellence, in any age, we leave to our own posterity, in the living or dead.

-2Paw.