One way to learn more about the history of small town New Hampshire is a stroll through the local cemetery.
I recently met with genealogist Erin Moulton at the Forest Hills Cemetery in Derry for a tour of her favorite gravesites.
“We can go to Hattie,” Moulton said. But then she changed direction. “Actually I should tell you about Ethel because she's funnier. But Hattie is really cool, too.”
She points to the gravestone of Ethel Adams who was born in 1877 and died in 1948.
“She cracks me up every time I see her name,” Moulton said. “She collected Scotch-Irish signs and omens and they are the funniest things. It's like, ‘If you see a white horse, a red headed man is near.’”
Moulton first discovered Ethel and her omens in a book of New Hampshire folk tales at the Derry Public Library where she’s a Genealogy and Reference Librarian. She also thinks of herself as a biographer, and she’s spent a lot of time in this cemetery learning about the people buried here.
“It's very weird, though, because I'll start talking about one of them and I have to stop and say, ‘This was in 1799,’ and get people up to speed because sometimes it's confusing,” Moulton said.
In Moulton’s new book “The Beginner’s Guide to Cemetery Sleuthing,” she decodes recurring symbols found on old gravestones and gives steps for how to learn more about the people buried there, especially those overlooked by history.
“If we look at more ordinary lives, we also understand the tapestry of Derry more, right?” Moulton said. “So we might not see an extravagant stone, but if we're looking at a lot of the smaller ones, we're seeing all the shoe factory workers. We're seeing everybody who's toiling day to day, and those stories are the stories of Derry.”
The cemetery is quiet and peaceful. We walk through rows of headstones on grassy slopes to find Laura Darling, born in 1853. She ran a local boarding house in town.
“We'd always see little social notes about her in the newspaper,” Moulton said. “And it was funny things like she lost her cat, her orange cat Ikey, at one point. So she'd posted a notice for him there.”
Moulton first found Darling’s name in a local community cookbook in the Derry library’s collection. She was intrigued by her pie recipe.
“I made her lemon pie, which didn't have any sugar,” Moulton said. “It was very sour.”
Then she combed through old Derry News articles and land records from the 1800s to piece together Darling’s life.
“In the newspaper she says, ‘consider going west.’ But I never saw evidence that she did go west. So at one point she may have been dreaming of leaving town,” Moulton said.
Instead, Darling went up to Concord and worked in a shoe factory. She passed away in the New Hampshire State Hospital.
With some patience and curiosity, Moulton believes anyone can become a cemetery sleuth and bring the stories of locals like Laura Darling back to life.
“First just wander and explore. Gather some clues from the headstone,” Moulton said. “You're basically getting a name, a time and a place, and then you can go to the databases and then you can explore what other local archives hold.”
So when you go to a cemetery next, you might not see ghosts, but you could learn the stories of those who once walked the same streets you do.
