I wonder if the 1930s picture was 'improved' a bit with a pencil or a china marker before the photo was taken?

Avery is the name of one of the founding families of several towns in New London County.

That would make a lot of sense; either that or someone of that era had done it (possibly even a descendant of the person buried there, or of some authority in the area or of the parish & churchyard, who would've been allowed to 'deface' the stone to make it more legible for the photograph) deliberately just before the photograph was taken. I can't imagine that the original stone had an extra 'paint job' to help define the molded or hand-carved writing, that would be totally gone eighty years later without either some 'refreshing' or signs of the original pigment, if there had been surviving 'stain' of the stone carving dating from the time of the original stonework and burial.

It's a good thing that the china-pencil, staining or painting of the etched letters was done in the 1930s as opposed to the time GiC took the photograph today; there's been enough further and significant erosion of the remaining details on the burial marker that without external references, would make pencilling or staining the carving now difficult or incomplete, because of the wear of time and the elements on the stone. Given that the burial (and the headstone) was already more than two centuries old by the time the photograph on the left was taken during the Great Depression (or thereabouts) I strongly suspect forward-thinking folk of the era (and who arranged the staining to be done and the vintage photograph to be taken) were, again, thinking ahead. They may have had no idea how bad the wear would get for certain eighty years down the road, but it was likely they suspected it by then.

-2Paw.

That it has eroded that much in the past 80 years or so out of over 300 is an indication of the damage done by acid rain.

The modified environment and chemicals present since the beginning of heavy industrialization in our North American bit of the Earth's water cycle, timing-wise. That makes a lot of sense. Whomever the people were who arranged for the photograph in the 1930s had either had their finger on the pulse of what was starting to happen (or the effects on other gravestones or on masonry that had been standing for centuries, now wearing down and away so much more rapidly) or noticed the change when they came by, told of the stone by their parents or grandparents but the condition being so vastly different, even then. And now, the stone is only half-legible, eighty years of pH-modified water and rain and air moisture grinding away at it.

I sustain my applause for the people who arranged for the photograph taken in the 1930s that GiC added to his own modern-day one above. They perhaps might not have known how badly the decomposition of the stone (or many others) would become by now, eighty years later, nor if or how it would accelerate further because of everything our industry and lifestyles over the last eight decades would change many of the basic components of our water cycle, but people who think ahead far enough don't have to predict the future with precision, whether or not they can. Their efforts are often to plan for that potential future, and to preserve what remains while they can.

-2Paw.

I took a walk through the old cemetery near where I grew up a few years ago. I remember walking down there with my Mom back in the mid-1960s to do rubbings. Now many of those stones, 200 to 250 years old, are nearly smooth.

The way you described how badly modern industry and chemical pollutants are throwing the heck out of our water-cycle's pH-levels, I'm not surprised, but I am sorry it's also affected something that close to you as well, Perfesser B.

We do have cemeteries of that vintage here (going back two hundred years); the oldest one I'm familiar with isn't a public churchyard, but started out as a family plot, in 1821, when this part of my hometown of Toronto was mostly farmland, or open, undeveloped scrub; the church it's attached to (or its original building) is that old. If I'm understanding how burials work for the graveyard, you either have to know descendants of that family and get their permission for a burial there, or be amongst those descendants; I could be wrong about that being the absolute bar being set about it. I've never actually been inside the green-grounds of it (I'm sure I could get proper permission) but one end of the yard- a small tongue of greensword, probably no more than ten or eleven feet wide, between the church's building and the house next door- is within eight feet or so of the street on which a bus route I used to take frequently runs, and had taken it for more than fifteen years on the same errand home. At that end, there are at least four headstones right up against the fence separating the burial ground's edge from the small little one's playground fronting the church property and the sidewalk outside a second fence, and you can clearly see the inscriptions on two of them (that I remember); those two date from the 1930s, and what I could see from the bus window where I would usually sit seems at least easily readable.

But yes, we're not talking two or two and a half centuries here. I know of one particular cemetery, not that further from there, but as far as I know it's difficult even to get permission to go inside the locked gates to look, that goes back all the way to the late 1700s (I believe the date it was petitioned as a cemetery was 1792), and it in fact is a Jewish/Judaic burial ground, the oldest one in the Greater Toronto Area. The synagogue that managed it, as far as I've researched, parted ways with it in the 1950s (and I gather at that time had closed down) and the last burials there were at that time. No-one has been interred there since, part of the reason being room; it is very, very small; probably seventy feet deep going east-west, and less than half that width north-south. I don't know for a fact that it's still regularly maintained (as in the grounds manicured, grass cut, etc.) but the few times I've been outside of its locked gates, I could see that it at least recently to then had been cut. There's a massive elm tree that over the years has grown between two graves and their gravestones, partly 'consuming' the stones in its growth and partly knocking the stones away in either direction. I'm concerned that if there are below-ground stone or concrete vaults where the burials were done, that it may have long since compromised them, although I knew about the elm's growth from a local news article, so I doubt it's any great secret kept from anyone who would be concerned with it.

-2Paw.

The old cemetery I mentioned has always been public. A few of the area churches had their own yards, but in the center of town the burials were along aptly named Cemetery Road. There were a number of graveyards on both sides of the road, all the way down to the old town dump. There were a few old wooden shacks near the dump with people still living in them fifty years or so ago. Some of the oldest parts of the cemeteries came right up to the shacks. Looking at the area from Google Maps, large areas of the older cemeteries have been taken over by McMansions. I know the lawyer responsible for those houses. If he had a scruple to his name he cashed it in decades ago. I'm fairly certain he had the graves 'removed' (at least the stones) and built over the burial grounds. I don't know if that town has city water -- I'll bet not. Would you drink out of a well drilled in a cemetery?

Chances the elm that grew between the folks' graves has not disrupted the vaults -- if the graves are old enough they may not have any -- just a wooden casket in the ground. That said, elms tend not to have tap or deep roots, but the root systems are quite expansive and may have invaded the grave spaces.

Geez, shades of 'Poltergeist'! I know that movie (in theory) was fantasy/horror, and those enormous new homes built on the site would probably not result in a very young girl being abducted by a spirit-demon onto the Astral Plane parallel to where the house is, but were I living in such a house- especially if a good chunk of its real estate had been occupied by a burial ground- it would be difficult for me to not mind what occupied the ground before my home (or basement) did.

Fun fact: Heather O'Rourke (who played Carol-Anne Freeling in all three of the Poltergeist movies) had the same birthday as myself, December 27th. She would be two years older than me now, if she hadn't died at 12 years of age from cardiac arrest and septic shock caused by a misdiagnosed intestinal stenosis, in 1988. I've even seen a video taken of her place of burial; a tiny, very under-the-radar cemetery off a main strip and down its only driveway entrance in Los Angeles, where a considerable number of very, very famous people in music and acting have their final resting places.

I agree with you about building or digging/drilling a well into ground that was right in the thick of the ground of a former cemetery; even though modern embalming chemicals only got their start of use during the American Civil War (I believe that was around the time of our Canadian Confederation; in the 1860s) and would not see widespread civilian/standard burial use for a decade or more later (it was initially a business venture, designed to be appealing to the families of fallen Civil War Soldiers who would want the deceased bodies to be shipped back to their family plots or intended burial places, quite a distance from the place they fell), it is quite unappealing to think an aquifer well would have its water pass through 'corrupted' dirt, where bodies or their decomposed elements would still lie. Even if there were no health implications involved, there would still be the spiritual aspect of drinking water and its obtaining 'disturbing the dead', deep beliefs going back as far as the beginnings of our distant ancestors burying their dead, that make the 37 years since 'Poltergeist's tale was told a tiny eyeblink in time-distance.

I'm glad you mentioned how an elm tree's root system works, especially the species' lack of tap roots (which I didn't know); while enough growing time would have a big, old elm like that getting plenty of standard roots in its ball going through the earth (grave, body space or otherwise), were there concrete vaults there (and as you say, in an old enough burial that would be entirely debatable) there would be no catastrophic distruption, or less of a chance of it. I don't know enough about more vintage Jewish/Judaic burials compared to modern ones; there may only be any appreciable difference between many Christian or non-denominational burials of any recent century in that, by custom, the bodies of practicing Jews are not embalmed or the flesh disturbed after death and before interment (and ideally not after the fact). The actual burial, save for any funerary or graveside rites by a rabbi or Jewish authority, might not involve any differences other than that.

I might ask my sawbones about that; my psychiatrist, I mean. He's Jewish, and more importantly, he's become a good and close friend in the twenty-five years we've been doctor and patient; I don't think a reasonable question or two (I've asked him similar ones before) to beg aide in relieving my ignorance, asked with respect, would be taken poorly or unkindly. He is familiar with this particular vintage graveyard I've mentioned, but I know I've asked him about his personal knowledge about it, and he knows it about as well as I do; knowing of it, but not a whole lot more.

-2Paw.

A friend who lived a few miles from my current home (I've lived here over 40 years) built a brand-new place in the woods about the time I built mine. His next-door neighbor had a house that was only a few years older. The neighbor needed a new well, but they immediately started bringing up human bones. The State archeologist determined it was an old family graveyard from the early 18^th Century, but recommended he relocate the well. Again, these old stones that GIC photographs were expensive and sometimes unobtainable. to the lower class.

I know it well. It's not a matter of milling and carving tech going from hand-powered drills and chisels to marble and granite cut with electric industrial saws hundreds of years later; a lot of people who would take the form of our salt-of-the-earth working class were often just getting by in those days, and not infrequently in the case of a bad winter or poor harvest, after that winter someone might visit their home (or not) and find the frozen bodies the spring after the fact (which themselves might be underweight from lack of enough food before the end came). It was bare-bones in the most literal way you could call economy in the 1600s and 1700s; simply being able to afford a burial at all, someone to dig the grave (if a family member didn't do it) and a parson to say last rites and oversee the lowering, could itself be a luxury. A wooden casket, just boards and properly containing the remains; nothing fancy; as opposed to a sewn-up shroud for the body going into the ground, might be even more of a luxury than that.

The fact that there are any burials (like the famous disputed '1629/1699'-dated headstone which I've seen pictures of, and which I believe GiC has photographed at least once) whose headstones are still intact and legible, and which have lasted as long as they have, are probably in no small part due to the materials they were made from (in this case; carved and reasonably hard stone). There are very likely many other burials whose markers have been dissolved or been damaged into crumbled bits no-one would recognize them as now; possibly even entire graveyards abandoned to the elements, when the last scions of a family died or moved away (like that of the estimated-18th-Century burial plot your friend's neighbour discovered, entirely by accident). I've seen videos of small graveyards like these, oftentimes quite old, but are so far from modern habitation (often deep in what would now be a heavily-forested area) or records kept so poorly (if they survive at all) that they really are little 'ghost graveyards'; hidden in valleys, forests and at the end of small roads (or alongside them, still visible) nobody cares to visit anymore.

-2Paw.