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Guest of Conner?
If you turn towards Tremont Street, placing Sam Adams directly
behind you, you will see across the path a relatively new granite
gravestone with the name Madeline F. Conner.
In 1985 the
city-funded Historic Burying Ground Initiative (HBGI) did a survey
of all sixteen burial grounds located in Boston proper. This
included a recording of each and every headstone and tomb’s
pertinent information (epitaph, condition, material, location) as
well as identifying candidates for repair, improving & expanding
pathways and updating information markers.
Now if one were
to look up the pertinent information recorded by the HBGI in
regard to the grave of Madeline F. Conner one would encounter a
mountain of…nothing. That’s because this headstone wasn’t there in
1985.
This wouldn’t be a surprise since technically burials in tombs
ended in 1879 (reserved) and open ground burials (unreserved) even
earlier. There seem to have been some exceptions for tomb burials
since 1879 (look for Rhys Williams’ 2003 headstone near John
Winthrop’s tomb at King’s Chapel Burial Ground) but that involved
the deceased’s remains having been cremated.
To add to the
mystery is that Madeline Conner supposedly died on Christmas Eve
1944, forty-one years before the 1985 survey.
Whether
Madeline Conner was actually buried here in a tomb back in 1944,
moved here after 1985, not buried here at all or (fill in the
blank) remains unanswered, as well as who was responsible for
placing the stone here.
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