Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Lives of the Past Informing the Future | Page 23

sweet auburn | 2019 volume ii
REMEMBERING THE
GREAT AND THE GOOD
Discoveries from Mount Auburn’s
Family Digitization Project
Mary Starbird, buried in a family
lot on Myrtle Path. Portrait taken
sometime in the mid-19th century.
Mount Auburn Cemetery,
paper admission ticket,
Boston, September 19, 1877
Andrew Skow, tinsmith,
Cambridge, MA, date unknown.
John Waldo, Jr. “Visiting the Family
Lots,” Cambridge, April 1994
Over the course of nearly 200 years, Mount Auburn has
become the final resting place for all those wishing to
be buried at the Cemetery, regardless of race, creed, or
religion. Mount Auburn is celebrated as the burial spot for
Boston’s cultural and intellectual leaders including Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Jacobs,
Nathaniel Bowditch, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Fannie
Farmer, R. Buckminster Fuller, and B.F. Skinner. Joining
its “notable residents” are the servants, soldiers, sailors,
midwives, blacksmiths, and everyday people who worked
tirelessly to build the economies of Boston, Cambridge, and
the surrounding communities. The stories for most of these
100,000 residents are still waiting to be discovered.
With its current Family Digitization project, Mount
Auburn is strengthening the role of this “landscape of
memory,” a place founded to offer the lessons of history
through a “communion with the dead.” Each month the
Cemetery provides opportunities for the public to scan
photographs, documents, ephemera, and other small objects
that help to tell the stories of those buried at Mount Auburn.
The materials digitized to date have already added immensely
to what we know about those buried at the Cemetery. An
exploration of these items also reminds us not only about
who we remember but also why and how we remember
them. Explore some of our recent discoveries and make an
appointment to scan your own families photos and mementos.
https://mountauburn.org/family-digitization-project/
This project has been funded through a Common Heritage Grant
from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Sebastian & Josephine Gianino,
Boston, 1920
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