Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Father Pitt assumes that this is a descendant or other relative of the Voegtly who donated the land for the original Voegtly Church in Dutchtown, whose name this cemetery perpetuates. The name of Mathias Voegtly is still quite visible, but the rest of the inscription is badly eroded. We can just make out the name of Elizabeth Voegtly, but the rest is difficult.

However, the graves of the Voegtlys are also marked with expensive granite memorials, and though they are overgrown with wild grapes (you can see the mound of grape vines to the right of the obelisk), Father Pitt pushed back the grapes enough to collect these data:

Mathias Voegtly: Born November 26, 1811; died January 17, 1884

Elizabeth Voegtly: Born July 28, 1805; died October 2, 1890.

A typical zinc monument adapted to Catholic tastes by adding a big cross on top. It remembers a seventeen-year-old boy who died in 1892; it may have been bought with the intention of adding other McIntyres as they moved in, but no other names were ever added, and most of the monument is taken up with the interchangeable filler designs offered in the monument company’s catalogue.

The Voegtly Cemetery in Troy Hill has an unusually fine wrought-iron fence and gate—and, because the ironworker left his name in the iron itself, we know exactly who is responsible for it.

Here is an interesting little document of the American immigrant experience from a small cemetery in the Glendale neighborhood of Scott Township. Father Pitt reconstructs the story this way:

When Adam Giehll died in 1911, his wife Anna M. (Anna Maria? Very likely, since this is a Catholic cemetery) bought a monument with space for his name, her name, and the name of her mother, Anna M. Weber. The birth and death dates of Adam and his mother-in-law were filled in, but—as is commonly done when a living spouse buys the monument—Anna M. Giehll’s death date was left as a blank line, ready to be cut when the time came. (You can see the rougher, less skillful cutting of her death date quite clearly on the stone.)

So far the whole thing is written in German. But when Anna M. Giehll died sixteen and a half years after her husband, her death date was filled in in English—the only line of English on the stone.

For this German Catholic family, then, the line between German and English was somewhere around the First World War—which is hardly surprising. Probably the children of Adam and Anna spoke English as their first language. This is the pattern Father Pitt sees in current immigrants to Pittsburgh: the first generation speaks the language of home and only broken English, but the second generation grows up speaking English and is perhaps only marginally fluent in the parents’ language.

A grave of a girl who did not quite live to eleven years old. The Nixon family was prominent in the congregation of Old St. Luke’s, and this is one of the more elaborate memorials in the churchyard. The epitaph, which takes up both sections of the base of the headstone, seems to be original, not one of those circulating funerary poems we usually find on graves of the late 1800s: an Internet search finds the poem mentioned only in connection with this particular monument—transcribed in a text tour of the burial ground by Mr. Charles Nixon, and now here.

Her form is missing from its place,
And will not come for calling;
God only calleth back his own,
Why should our tears be falling?

The echo of the childish notes,
Have ceased their happy ringing.
We cannot catch a sound that floats,
From where she now is singing.

A marble monument in what we might call folk-romantic style. The recording angel has been eroded by pollution and time, but it does not look as though it was ever a very skillful carving, Nevertheless, the whole effect of the monument is very pleasing.

The epitaph (a poem commonly found on monuments of the era) reads:

Dear mother, rest in quiet sleep,
While friends in sorrow o’er thee weep,
And here their heartfelt offerings bring
And near thy grave thy requiem sing.

A popular genre of German grave: the single unit with headstone, footstone, and sides, the whole thing looking very much like a nineteenth-century bedstead. Maria Dorothea Gros was born in the little town of Lorbach in Hessen-Darmstadt, now the German state of Hesse. A translation of the inscription:

HERE GENTLY RESTS IN PEACE
MARIA DOROTHEA
GROS,
SPOUSE OF
JACOB GROS.
BORN AUGUST 24, 1828
IN LORBACH,
HESSEN-DARMSTADT.
DIED SEPTEMBER 27, 1888.

A bit of a mystery. This metal shield has fallen from some monument somewhere, and is now sitting on the base of the Kredel monument. Father Pitt has never seen a grave marker with a shield like this, so he does not know what kind of thing it would have been attached to—perhaps an iron post that has disintegrated? The rust has obliterated some of the letters, but Father Pitt is fairly sure of his reconstruction: