In late October, my husband, Gary, and I took a road trip to Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens, New York. A huge cemetery, it commands a stunning view of the midtown Manhattan skyline.

The influx of emigrants at the turn of the 20th century from Spartan villages to the New York City area is legendary and well documented in Michael Contopoulos’ The Greek Community of New York City: Early Years to 1910. Among them were my four grandparents with many of their siblings, cousins and villagers. Studying their migration and resettlement is fascinating–in essence, they recreated their village in Brooklyn. And that means that I have hundreds of relatives who lived there.

As a child, I ran around my grandparents’ house with my cousins, oblivious to the assortment of “old folks” who would visit on Sunday afternoons. But today, they visit in heaven, and I run around connecting the dots of their relationships.

In preparation for this cemetery trip, I spent days online looking for family death records in the outstanding collection on MyHeritage: New York City Deaths, 1866-1948. Navigating through the corrupted spelling of Greek surnames, I was nevertheless successful in finding dozens of my parents’ cousins and their spouses. These death certificates include the deceased’s burial place at the bottom of page one.

I found people buried in several New York cemeteries, but I focused on Mt. Olivet. I created an Excel spreadsheet with 75 names and emailed the cemetery office to request a lookup of those plot numbers. Although many were buried in family plots, there were still a lot of names for the staff to search. (We gave a monetary donation and brought candy to the staff to show our appreciation.)

Gary downloaded a map of the cemetery from their website and marked how many people were buried in each section. We felt well prepared as we headed north from our home in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.

For two days, we walked and searched, finding headstones for many but surprisingly, not all. Several people whose death certificates listed Mt. Olivet as the burial place were not in the cemetery records. The office staff explained that in such cases, the family chose a different cemetery if there was a plot elsewhere owned by a relative. For those without headstones, we learned that many immigrant families did not have money for both a burial and a monument. The empty spaces in many lots are unmarked resting places.

By far, however, the ultimate heartbreak was learning that 13 infants in my family are at Mt. Olivet, and not one has a headstone. Among them are my mother’s baby brother, Peter Pappas, who died of pneumonia at 4 months, 10 days. I have now ordered a monument so he will not be forgotten. All of these babies were born to immigrant parents who suffered their losses in a strange land far from their immediate families. (See list below.*)

Sometimes it’s hard to find a marker even with the plot number; the dizzying number of granite monoliths can be disorienting. To help others locate our relatives, Gary had a plan to create a map for each burial place. We took a photo of every family headstone and used our phones to pinpoint its GPS coordinates. For those with no headstone, we photographed the general area and created a virtual marker to memorialize who was buried there.

As we walked the grounds, I recognized so many surnames and knew exactly from which Spartan village these people had come. Some of the earliest headstones had the name of the village inscribed–a point of Spartan pride in his/her χωριό.

Upon arriving home, the “real work” began: names and data had to be entered into my genealogy database; FindAGrave pages were created for each person with both the headstone and the map; everything was uploaded into family trees on FamilySearch, MyHeritage and Ancestry. The more information that I entered into these genealogy websites, the more “hints” popped up which expanded the profile of each individual and added new members to his/her family. To discover more about married couples, I turned to the MyHeritage collection of New York City Marriages, 1866-1949, a phenomenal resource which has images of marriage licenses and certificates. What makes this collection so valuable is its inclusion of the original Affidavit for License to Marry, which is in the handwriting of the prospective groom and bride. This proves the spellings of the Greek surnames as used by the individuals, thus eliminating the “wonky indexing” done by those who do not know our names. Also, these records include the mothers’ maiden names.

Now that we have a workable system for cemetery research, we will return to Mt. Olivet and other cemeteries in the New York area to continue this work. It’s important to that all information is put on FindAGrave as well as online family trees, so as to enable our ever-expanding web of descendants to have success in finding connections to their families.

*Memory Eternal: babies of my relatives at Mt. Olivet who died without markers

• Aridas, George Christos 1923-1926, son of Christos Aridas & Stella Lambrianakos
• Aridas, Louis Basil 1918 (4 months), son of Basil George Aridas and Politime Adamakos
• Catsores, Bessie 1917-1930, daughter of John Anthony Catsores and Eleni Papagiannakos
• Catsores, Pota 1909-1910, daughter of John Anthony Catsores and Eleni Papagiannakos
• Catsores, Theodoros 1918 (4 days), son of John Anthony Catsores and Eleni Papagiannakos
• Georgas, Christine 1925-1926, daughter of George Georgas and Panagiota Lerikos
• Londis, Constantina 1919 (7 days), daughter of James John Londis and Pauline Chrisomalis
• Markopoulos, Konstantine James 1905-1906, son of James Nikolaos Markopoulos and Mary Christakos
• Moundas, Peter Harry 1922-1924, son of Harry Moundas and Mary Neckles
• Pappas, George James 1916-1917, son of James P. Pappas (Papagiannakos) and Athanasia Morfogen
• Pappas, Mimi 1914-1918, daughter of James P. Pappas (Papagiannakos) and Athanasia Morfogen
• Pappas, Peter Louis 1915-1916, son of Louis Peter Pappas (Papagiannakos) and Angelina Eftaxias
• Tactikos, Stella 1924 (1 month), daughter of Georgios Nikolaos Tactikos and Katherine Patsakis