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Standing Over Ancestors' Resting Place

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By SHARON TATE MOODY

Tribune correspondent

Published: September 28, 2008

I stood alone at the corner of the 300-year-old rock church in Wilmington, Del. The only other living being seemed to be an angry squirrel, hanging upside down in a maple tree, his tail shaking as he made it clear I was not welcome in the old cemetery.

But I knew I was welcome - perhaps not by this little creature but by the spirits of those who rested in this burial ground of the Old Swedes Church.

Church records show that my seventh great-grandfather John Stalcup, who died in 1751, and my eighth great-grandfather Peter Stalcup, who died in 1709, are buried here. Their graves are under two stones on which inscriptions were never made.

I had arrived early for my appointment with the executive director of the church foundation, eager for what I knew would be a soul-touching visit for me.

Beneath my feet was the very land on which my ancestor Johan Andersson had arrived as a teenager from Strangnas, Sweden, in 1641. He later became a soldier for Gov. John Printz and took the surname Stalkofta, allegedly for the coat of steel mail his occupation required. As many families with non-English surnames, the second generation anglicized the Swedish name to Stalcup.

Johan - who was Peter's father, John's grandfather and my ninth great-grandfather - died about 1686. At the time of his death a piece of his land was being used as a community burying ground. After his death, the church would be built on his land.

For those reasons, historians have no doubt that Johan is buried somewhere in what is now the churchyard. Throughout the cemetery are blank stones marking the earliest resting places of early settlers, some buried as many as 60 years before the 1698 construction of the historical church.

There are no words for how I felt as I stood on what had been Stalcup land, knowing that it took great courage and strength to be the first on this very soil. Did it ever occur to them that seven and eight generations later one of their kin would walk among their uninscribed tombstones? Records show that 20 Stalcups are buried somewhere in the churchyard. Their 20th century descendants have placed a memorial stone for them about 40 feet from the southeast corner of the church.

When the church foundation's executive director arrived, she graciously gave me a personal tour of the small chapel, which is one of the country's oldest church buildings still in regular use for worship. Because it had a unique role in the religious history of neighboring Fort Christina and the colony of New Sweden, it is a Registered National Landmark. She pointed out the probable location of the pew that church records show belonged to my Stalcup family.

The director assisted me in finding my ancestors' births, marriages, and deaths recorded in the 17th and 18th century records of the church. On this day, I was as close to genealogy heaven as a living researcher can get.

Throughout this momentous visit I recalled a recent paragraph from September'S issue of Family Tree Magazine in which www.findagrave.com was given status as one of "101 best Web sites."

In describing the Web site, the magazine asked, "Who needs to go tromping around graveyards when you have this easy-to-search site which makes it easy to, well, dig into graves?" The entry stuck in my mind because my brain screamed "heresy!"

Although the Internet has many wonderful Web sites - Find A Grave is one of them - nothing can replace the spiritual experience that comes from standing over your ancestors' final resting places.

Apparently this old cemetery has been well loved over the years. Care is shown in the immaculately cut grass and trimmed shrubs and in the condition of the old stones.

I left the church and its burial grounds with a sense of my connection to the rich Swedish contribution to American history and with a renewed energy to study that period in time for a fuller understanding of it.

Cleaning Tombstones

Obviously I'm not the only one who spent some of this summer appreciating cemeteries.

Reader Linda Perdue wrote asking what to do about the green-gray "stuff" she had found on a recent visit to a North Carolina cemetery. She asked if I knew of a safe, easy way to remove "this stuff." I knew immediately "the stuff" was lichen, a curse visited upon many grave markers.

I referred Perdue to www .gravestonestudies.org. That site advises "gently and carefully to scrape lichen only with soft natural bristle brushes or wooden sticks after softening it with plain water." If it is stubborn and doesn't come off easily, the organization suggests not removing it.

The Web site offers some interesting preservation techniques and tips for reading stones on which the inscriptions have faded.

Unexpected Evidence

The investigative spirit of genealogists sometimes amazes me. It seems we never cease our quest for facts and details about our ancestors. Ancestry Weekly Journal reader Almeda Reams recently wrote that after her mother died she had the task of going through belongings and "throwing away old bills and such."

She discovered her mother had kept old calendars on which she had written such things as "deaths of every family pet, graduation of grandchildren and anniversaries of relatives." She urges that we look carefully at old saved records "before you pitch them."

The Ancestry Weekly Journal is a free e-mail publication of Ancestry.com.

Write to Sharon Tate Moody in care of The Tampa Tribune, 200 S. Parker St., Tampa FL 33606; or e-mail stmoody0720@mac.com.

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