It may sound macabre, but the highlight of this trip for me was my visit to three cemeteries, two in Salisbury, Connecticut, where I grew up, and one in Bristol, Connecticut, where I found my great great grandfather's family plot! Please click on a photograph to see a larger version of the photgraph.
| The home of our gracious hosts, the Eastlake family, in Carmel, New York. Having us visit was such a traumatic experience that they have now moved out of the house back to Massachusetts. | |
| My mother's grave in the Catholic cemetery in Salisbury, Connecticut. Her actual date of birth was 1906, not 1916, but our family did not discover this until her brother disclosed the secret late in the 1970's. | |
| My grandfather's family plot in the Salisbury cemetery. | |
| The Mitchell family marker in the Salisbury cemetery. | |
| My father's grave. | |
| A closer view of the marker for my father's grave. | |
| My Aunt Eleanor's grave marker. | |
| My grandfather's grave marker. | |
| My grandmother's grave marker. | |
| Reasearch in the Connecticut State Library disclosed that there were Mitchells buried in cemeteries in Bristol and New Britain. My cousin Neil and his wife Laura and son Ian drove to the West Street cemetery, west of West Street and just south of U.S. Route 6, Terryville Road, at North 41 degrees, 40.715 minutes, West 72 degrees, 57.205 minutes. | |
| With no specific hope of finding anything of interest, we wandered for a few minutes through the cemetery, when suddenly Laura spotted a moderately prominent obelisk with the name MITCHELL on it (previous picture, this picture, and five following pictures). | |
| This proved to be the gravesite of my great great grandfather, George H. Mitchell, his wife Lurene Hooker, and a number of descendants with whom I am not familiar. | |
| I took notes on the inscriptions found on the four sides of the obelisk, but they are not at hand right now. I will add them in later. | |
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| Infant mortality was an all-too-common fact of life in the early nineteenth century. | |
| Markers for nine members of the Mitchell family. | |
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| Since my great great grandfather was married to Lurene Hooker, descended from the Rev. Thomas Hooker, one of the founders of the Connecticut colony, it can't be a coincidence that this Hooker family plot is immediately adjacent to the Mitchell family plot. | |
| Two markers for members of the Hooker family. | |
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| Two views of another Mitchell marker in the same cemetery. | |
| As of yet, I am not sure that I am related to these Mitchells. | |