Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Reimagining the Cemetery as Museum | Page 15

But why were Bertha, Ashton, and Caroline buried in the Phelps lot? Pinkerton had found no evidence of a family relationship. Acting on a hunch, he searched the Plot Finder database for Shute family burials and found Caroline’s parents’ graves in Lot 2014, next to the Phelps lot on Honeysuckle Path. Cemetery deeds showed that the two adjoining lots were purchased the same day in 1852 by James M. Shute and Sewell Phelps. Pinkerton learned that the two men had been business associates at the Boston Type and Stereotype Foundry for many years. He also noted that the second decedent buried in the Shute lot was a three-year-old child named Bertha Phelps Shute, who died when Caroline Shute was sixteen years old. It appeared that Bertha Phelps Highley was named after her mother’s baby sister. Census documents indicated that neither Sewell Phelps nor his sister Elizabeth G. Phelps—who were buried in the Phelps lot in 1864 and 1896, respectively—ever married. Pinkerton guessed that they may have acted as godparents for James Shute’s daughter Bertha. When little Bertha and her brother Ashton died in 1889, the Highleys did not have a lot of their own, and most of the grave spaces in the Shute family lot were taken or spoken for. However, the Phelps lot next door had seen just two burials, with only one more expected. There was plenty of room for the Highley children who died so young and the remaining Highley family after that. Caroline died in 1891, and Philip Highley remarried the following year. In 1893, he bought a separate lot at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Lot 5266 on Excelsior Path, for the burial of a son born prematurely to his new wife. As she was then just 23 years old, they had every reason to expect that there would be more children for whom additional burial space might one day be needed. Bertha’s carte de visite arrived at Mount Auburn Cemetery in due course, accompanied by Doughty’s handwritten letter to the family. She explained that she bought the old photo at an antiques booth at the Alaska State Fair in the late 1980s, and it was the first of many she would collect over the years. Now in her forties and armed with an Ancestry.com account, she recently started trying to return identifiable photos to their families. “In July of this year,” she wrote, “I had my first return of an entire album to a family in Chicago.” Bertha’s is just one of many cases that Cemetery archivists have cracked to connect families with their past, sometimes with the help of benevolent strangers. Inquiries may be addressed to [email protected]. View from the James M. Shute lot looking towards the Sewell Phelps lot.