Died July 5, 1836 & February 25, 1841
Many are the mysteries in Eastern Cemetery. Years of neglect and a shortage of good records often leave those of us who work in this spectacular landscape with question marks over our noggins.
Then there are the times that we get lucky and uncover something new. We did just that last summer with the realization of an additional name on a gravestone for Charles Burns. Martha and Mike were diligently working on conservation and decided to pull up this broken stone for repair and reset. What they found was that not only did it list Charles Henry Burns, but his sister, Ellen! Ellen is not listed in the burial book, so we were very excited about this new find.
The photo here shows the slate stone, decorated with an urn, willow, and simple border, right after it was pulled from the ground. Where the stone turns from light to dark reveals what was underground. It is broken into several pieces, and Ellen's inscription seems to have been cut by a different stone carver. At the very bottom of the stone—in the area never meant to be viewed by passersby—are carver marks (a 2 and 3).
Vital records are found for Ellen's birth in Portland but not her death. Charles' record indicates that it was created from reading his gravestone. It is most likely that even way back then, only Charles’ name and dates were above ground when the vital records were made, so Ellen never made it into the list of internments for Eastern Cemetery.
Both of these infants were the children of James and Eunice (Pridham) Burns, who lived in Portland and had at least two other children who survived to adulthood: Elizabeth Q. (born 1827) and Hannah Leach (born 1829). Only James was listed in the 1850 Boston census living with his daughter Elizabeth and her husband.
CHARLES HENRY,
Son of
James & Eunice
Burns
died July 5, 1836,
aged 10 mos.
ELLEN BURNS
died Feb. 25, 1841,
aged 10 mos.
There are more photos of the Burns stone on our Flickr site. We have posted over 12,000 images organized in albums and tagged for you to peruse. Thank you, Ron Romano, for researching the Burns family!
You can suggest a subterranean celebrity! Just send an email—it doesn't take much to make a nice little story. An index of all of our Subterranean Celebrities is available.
If you would ever like to help us with conservation where you can discover new history like we do, please drop us a line or find out more on our website's conservation page.
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