John Wright and Eunice Hatch are my fourth great grandparents. While I have some good information on them, I don’t know when they died or where they are buried. Figuring this out has been a recent quest for me.
I know John was alive in 1855 and living in Palmer, MA. I can’t find any information on him or two of his younger sons after 1855. Assuming he and/or his sons died while living in Palmer, it seams reasonable that he was buried either in either family plots in Ludlow or Palmer. Last year, Laurie and I walked the relevant Ludlow cemeteries and had no luck. Yesterday, we walked a couple Palmer cemeteries.
The first cemetery we visited was Three Rivers – Thorndike Cemetery. It is a small cemetery with a very steep incline for most of the front. There were very limit records available on the cemetery and it wasn’t listed on FindAGrave.com. Many of the stones were hard to read. There were large sections without any stones. I don’t know if this was by design or there are many graves with missing headstones. While there were some small clusters of names with similar names, there weren’t so much as to make me think the cemetery was a informal burial ground for local farming families. The oldest headstones seemed to go back to the early 1840s. We did find a Lucretia Wright, but there is no immediate relationship to my family.
The second cemetery we visited was Four Corners Cemetery. This cemetery has been able to expand by acquiring adjacent property. According to the Town of Palmer’s web site, the cemetery was laid out in 1851. We concentrated our search in the areas that seemed to be original. Once again, no luck. The only Wright I found was Henry Nelson Wright Jr. He is also a descendant of John and Eunice, but a relatively recent burial.
While I thought both cemeteries were real possibilities, we had no luck in Palmer. There are two other non-Catholic cemeteries in Palmer: Palmer Center Cemetery and Oak Knoll Cemetery. Palmer Center Cemetery is very interesting, very old and supposedly haunted. It is also well documented and would have been closed to new burials at the time of John’s death. Oak Knoll Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Palmer. It is also one of Palmer’s oldest cemeteries, but was able to expand and is still open for new burials. I have walked it in the past, but it probably warrants a second look some time in the future.