Published: April 25, 2008 12:07 am            

ADAMCZYK: Where do we go when we die?

Look at it on a map, and you quickly get the idea that Kenmore and the Town of Tonawanda are largely greenspace, like Manhattan. In a way they are. You’ve got Brighton Park in the east, Sheridan Park in the west, the pocket parks Lincoln, Mang and Crosby Field in the south, and across the middle, a large swath of cemetery space.

Ah, cemeteries, quiet, lush and tranquil, “characterized by an uninterrupted sea of grass, trees, granite features and neatly kept flower beds.” I’m quoting from the Web site of Elmlawn Cemetery in Tonawanda, which, with Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Kenmore, offers 237 acres of calm and lustrous beauty immediately south of the Youngmann Expressway. They essentially separate the Town from the City of Tonawanda, and can blissfully but momentarily separate the citizens from reality.

What got me thinking about these places was a recent talk at the local history museum by Carmen Coleo, director of Catholic cemeteries for the Diocese of Buffalo, and thus proprietor of Mt. Olivet (Elmlawn says it “welcomes all faiths”). I’m clearly a lover of history, but the general fascination with graveyards and monuments has always eluded me (except for one, Highgate Cemetery in London. Not only is Karl Marx buried there, but the entire place is the prototype for those creepy, gone-to-ruin burial grounds you see in horror films and nightmares. The place was often rented to Hammer Films to produce movies wherein Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee chase each other around the markers).

Mt. Olivet and Elmlawn are well-ordered, well-run and spectacularly attractive properties, but the joy of spending a Sunday tiptoeing through the tombstones is for someone else.

Mr. Coleo’s lecture mentioned the several bishops buried in Mt. Olivet and its remarkable history, as well as its veterans’ memorials, statuary and chapels (boxer Tommy Paul and Yankees manager Joe McCarthy are entombed there as well). Some of its earth was excavated in the 1960s and moved several hundred feet north to help underpin the I-290. This is its centennial year, opened and consecrated in 1908 as the first Catholic cemetery in the Northtowns. Elmlawn goes back to 1901, and between the two have about 115,000 burials and “mausoleum entombments,” with 1,500 more annually.

Clearly, Ken-Ton has more dead inhabitants than living, and both Elmlawn and Mt. Olivet have acreage available for what is referred to as “expansion.”

Some of our deceased are in the ancient, tiny graveyards that dot the area, hard to find unless you seek or stumble over them. Old books of local history mention burial grounds on River Road (under the former Buffalo Slag Company) and on Two Mile Creek Road (where the Grand Army of the Republic ran interment ceremonies). The Town of Tonawanda maintains two relatively visible little cemeteries, the Failing Cemetery on Delaware Road (named after the Failing Brothers, early area landowners) and the one that surrounds the history museum itself on Knoche Road.

While the serious study of history seems to be on the decline, cemeteries are somehow in vogue these days. The amateur study of genealogy, which probably was first popularized by the television miniseries “Roots” in 1977 and propelled by various PBS documentaries about Ellis Island and other markers of ancestral American lineage, employs gravestones as touchstones.

People arrive at cemeteries these days not with flowers but with notebooks and video cameras, there to note the dates on the monuments and to piece together their family trees. Grandma’s boring old stories about what she did and didn’t do when she was a girl are being remembered and researched, with software and immigration records and the Internet as tools (and let’s hope she got it right. Grandma’s memory doesn’t stand a chance against the available technology).

An organization dedicated to Western New York genealogy thrives with meetings, journals, microfilm projects and officers from Kenmore and Tonawanda. Whether one’s people are from Sicily, Poland or elsewhere, cemeteries today are being data-mined. Elmlawn and Mt. Olivet, among others, stand ready to help.

This is all a series of comforts, for some people. The elder ones know where their earthly remains will spend eternity, and the younger ones, their family’s futures, eagerly soak up every available fact about their heritage. In another egalitarian example of privilege descending from the rich to the common person, no one cares if they are from blueblood stock or stevedores, they merely want to know. That’s who’s prowling those cemeteries, those landscaped jewels south of the Youngmann and the tiny ones with the saw-toothed old grave markers, these days.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears Fridays in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.

        

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