Midterm Brainstorm – Pre-Civil War Cemeteries

My idea for the walking tour would be going to the sites of historic graveyards around the city. I wanted to do a walking tour of the builders of the graveyards and maybe other non-grave yard locations they might have built, but I couldn’t so far find information on any specific builders/movers/laborers. These three pictures are of three locations I might use, though I think I’ll definitely end up having to change the scope of the project because of how far the locations seem to be from each other.

Halenbeek Family Burial Grounds from Flickr
, location no longer exists and a quick google maps search is a little ambiguous with where the site might have been.
Albany NY Halenbeek Family Burial Grounds - Corner of South Pearl & Hamilton Sts -removed in 1860

Albany Rural Cemetery, still exists and was established in the 1840s. According to the cemetery website the location is fairly popular as a tourist attraction (Flickr has loads and loads of pictures of the head stones and some illustrations, like those below), so maybe I can switch the tour to be more ARC-focused.
albany rural cemetery 1844
lodge at rural cemetery 1884
Gardener of the Albany Rural Cemetery

The Washington Park Cemetery, which no longer exists, was located across the park. Its bodies were officially relocated to the ARC by 1868. Focusing between WPC and ARC might actually make up a more cohesive project than trying to dig up all the old private graveyards churches and families used, if I could find an interesting angle. For right now, I have a picture of an old map laid over a current one indicating where the cemetery would have been. This was found on a site that lead me to a tweet.

(the image linked to above is here:)

2 thoughts on “Midterm Brainstorm – Pre-Civil War Cemeteries

  • February 23, 2016 at 2:03 am
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    Washington Park could be pretty great–it’s right in downtown in a pretty walkable area, and it’s near where a lot of related businesses/cemeteries likely are. The 1866 city directory (https://archive.org/stream/albanycitydirect1866unse#page/n7/mode/2up) isn’t text searchable, but the TOC has a listing of cemeteries. That one’s 1866, but archive.org has a couple others also: https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22albany%20city%20directory%22 (just be careful for the Albanys in Indiana, Georgia and Oregon). City directories and the newspapers linked under course resources may also get you related businesses like your gardener, or maybe some embalmers or gravediggers (maybe).

    The ARC connection is a good one, but might not fit for a walking tour since it’s so far away. One take might be to do a Center Square/Washington Park neighborhood tour of, essentially, cemetaries which are no longer there, and then link at the end to the ARC’s site Where Are They Now style.

    Another way to keep it in the neighborhood would be to figure out where the churches were that were burying people in the Washington Park cemetery.

    And for something like the family cemetery, I assume you had difficulty finding the location because the streetnames are no longer the same–there’s listings of street name changes here http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nyalbany/streets.html and here https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/streets.html

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