About five years ago I found out about Girod Street Cemetery in New Orleans. It was the first mainly Protestant cemetery in mostly Catholic New Orleans, started in 1822 by the Episcopal church which eventually became Christ Church Cathedral. The Wikipedia article about the cemetery has some great history, much of which seems chaotic. In 1833 there was a big cholera outbreak in New Orleans and the cemetery became a dumping ground for bodies. It was a mixed race cemetery, so there were tons of graves of black people, slaves, and former slaves. Because it was New Orleans with its high water table and frequent flooding, the graves were above ground, sometimes in structures six tombs high. Over time the cemetery suffered from neglect and by the 1940’s was in really bad shape, at which time it was decided to close the cemetery and redevelop the land. Families were asked to make arrangements to move the remains of their relatives, but I don’t know how many people did that. Ultimately a contract was awarded to another cemetery to haul everybody off and rebury them, but very little provision seems to have been made for preserving tombstones or keeping everyone straight. In 1957, just before the cemetery was finally closed, a Life magazine photographer took a bunch of eerie and horrific pictures of overgrown graves, broken into, with coffins spilling out. Google has a lot of those photos in a collection that allows you to start a slideshow of about fifty pictures. There is also a great blog page with some of those pictures and more history that is definitely worth seeing. I don’t think the photos were ever published in the magazine.
I knew from my research that some of our early New Orleans relatives had been buried at Girod, but there was a lot less information than there were graves. In the 1930’s there was a WPA project to index all of the historic graves in New Orleans, creating a card catalog of people buried there, including inscriptions. I knew that our ancestor, Alexander Grant, who immigrated to New Orleans from Scotland in the 1820’s had a brother, Archibald, who either came with him or was visiting, but who died in the 1833 cholera epidemic and was buried in Girod. Alexander Grant’s father-in-law, Jacob Knab, was buried in the same crypt maybe just because things were so hectic at the time. In 2017, I found a record of those two graves on findagrave.com. There is a picture there now, but I’m not sure if it was there at the time. Maybe I just didn’t realize how incredibly rare it would be to have a picture of a grave in a cemetery that no longer exists. (The information on Archibald’s findagrave page about his parentage is not correct as I write this.)
Taking another look at the records at Family Search this year, I found that they have now indexed microfilm of the cemetery card catalogs from the 1930’s. Cemeteries usually keep their own records, but I don’t know what may have happened to those. The city of Augusta did a great job of digitizing their cemetery records which is how I was able to track down most of the Cashin relatives, often including not just dates, but what they died from and sometimes their relatives. The New Orleans card catalogs seem to be based mostly on field information. Still, this is critical since in the case of Girod, there isn’t a field anymore. And great anyway since the carving on graves can become illegible or graves can be broken. So the grave for Archibald Grant has the nice bit of added information that he is a native of Nairnshire, Scotland, though I already knew that. I was able to look up more New Orleans ancestors in the card catalog files, sometimes discovering when they died. Findagrave does not index nearly all of the thousands of people who were buried at Girod yet, so I got lucky finding Archibald and Jacob.
I wanted to look through the Life pictures on the off chance that something familiar would appear. I saw the picture above, but didn’t think much of it. As I looked through some of the pictures on the Google page I saw you could almost make out some writing, so I looked for Grants. Then I found out you could zoom in on most of the pictures and make out a lot more writing. Well, that’s interesting. I zoomed in on the picture above, just below the big hole, and could clearly make out Archibald Grant’s grave. In fact, the picture of his grave at findagrave is based on a different picture of just his grave, shown below, taken at a slightly different angle.
I think I see a femur in the picture. Anyway, by zooming in on the picture of the whole crypt, I can see Archibald’s grave at the bottom, but I can see a lot more. There are five areas that still have writing. And the big hole was certainly covered by another gravestone at one time with more names (looks like some broken pieces of a tablet in front and on the left of the tomb). The pictures were taken after they had started moving graves to the new place, so maybe everything looks worse than it was before then.
I couldn’t directly download the zoomed in picture of the Grant-Saul crypt, but I was able to get parts of it with screen captures and then piece it back together at full size. I changed the contrast and brightness to try and make it easier to read. I still can’t make out all of it, but combined with the card catalog information that recorded all of this in the 1930’s, I can get most of it.
Region 1: In memory of Archibald Grant, native of Nairnshire, Scotland, died June 8, 1833, aged 32 years and Jacob Knab, died August 12, 1832, aged 82
Region 2: John D. Saul born August 15, 1875, died June 15, 1901
Region 3: Mae Florence Brothers, wife of Earl A Hymel, born April 4, 1904, died Nov. 18, 1927.
Region 4: Mary Louise Redmond born July 20, 1903, died Sept 14, 1903. My beloved husband, Adelberte Claflin, born Jan 24, 1866 Hopkington, Mass. died Dec. 12, 1927.
Region 5: Cora Isabella West born July 2, 1867, died Oct. 7, 1909. Johanna E. Thomas, wife of Archibald G. Saul, born Dec. 14, 1853, died July 29, 1916. Archibald Grant Saul, born June 20, 1861, died Oct. 23, 1919.
Region 6: is blank or else the gravestone was removed
The Saul family started with Joseph Saul who emigrated from England and settled in New Orleans before the War of 1812. He didn’t like New Orleans and I have found a letter where he tries to get a position in the government in Washington, DC and also a story where he got into a duel and may have saved his life by wrapping his body tightly in silk strips that acted like kevlar (this was considered cheating). He had several children, including Julia D. Saul, who married Alexander Grant after Alexander’s first wife and the mother of all of his children, Catherine Knab, died (the crypt’s Jacob Knab was her father). Then one of Alexander and Catherine’s children, Mary Grant, married one of Joseph Saul’s grandchildren, Joseph D. Saul. Most of the people in this crypt are Mary and Joseph’s children as well as their spouses and children. Mae Florence Brothers was the daughter of Rita Alice Saul. Mary Louise Redmond was the daughter of Rosa Mary Saul and her first husband Martin Redmond, who she must have divorced. I didn’t have any record of her previously since she died as an infant. Adelberte Claflin was Rosa’s second husband. Cora West was originally Cora Saul. The Joseph D. Saul at the top of the crypt is also a child of Mary and Joseph.
Most of the Sauls and Grants in New Orleans had died out or moved by the 1950’s, so I doubted anyone moved their remains. However, I found out that the cemetery whose job it was to relocate all of the remains did make a special crypt at the new location, Hope Mausoleum (only the white families! the black families were moved somewhere else). A plaque there mentions the families that were moved and the list includes the Grant and Saul families. According to this, remains from a family crypt were transferred to an individual container (this page says the containers were described as drums which were buried under the mausoleum building) which was then marked with the family name. They also have 15 headstones from Girod, but nobody we know. But it does sound like maybe most of the bones of our Girod relatives are at the Hope Mausoleum.
Here’s a version of the photograph based on the full size version, then enhanced for contrast and cropped to show just the vault. You can click on the image to see it at full size.
It would be great to have an earlier picture to see what the center panel might have said and if there was ever an inscription on the lower right. There are still a lot of people in the family that have records from Girod, but whose names do not appear in the picture of the crypt, including Alexander Grant, Sr., his two wives, plus Mary Grant and her husband Joseph D. Saul. The microfilm records show Jos. D. Saul is buried in A. Grant’s tomb, but it isn’t clear if this is the tomb they are talking about (possibly A. being Archibald) or Alexander had a different one. Joseph D. Saul’s father is Thomas H. Saul and he is shown buried in the Saul tomb. Could that be another one or this one?
Here’s a table showing all the children and spouses. The italics skip generations to help you keep up with the indenting. Bold indicates people buried in this crypt.
Joseph Saul 1771-1856
m. ???
Joseph D. Saul 1797-1820
Julia D. Saul 1801-1886
m. Alexander Grant
Thomas Harrison Saul 1804-1864
m. Elsa Fellows 1802-1872
Joseph Drake Saul 1828-1889
m. Mary Grant 1839-1881
Florence Annette Saul 1859-1942
Archibald Grant Saul 1861-1919
m. Johanna E. Thomas 1853-1916
Ida Mary Saul 1862-1864
Cora Isabella Saul 1867-1909
m. Walter Owen West 1866-1947
Martha West 1889-1889
Robert Stanford West 1891-1891
Rosa Mary Saul 1872-1957
m. Martin Daniel Redmond 1865-1915
Daniel Clarke Redmond 1901-1974
Mary Louise Redmond 1903-1903
m. Adelberte Claflin 1866-1927
Joseph Drake Saul 1875-1901
Rita Alice Saul 1878-1956
m. Pierce Lawrence Brothers Sr. 1878-1943
Pierce Lawrence Brothers, Jr. 1899-1963
May Florence Brothers 1904-1927
m. Earl Ashley Hymel 1899-1985
Corrinne Lois Hymel 1925-1982
Kenneth Earl Hymel 1926-2012
Willis Saul 1840-??
Thomas Harrison Saul 1841-1884
Mathilda Saul 1843-??
Annette Saul 1844-??
Elmina Saul 1844-??
Alice Josephine Saul 1851-1942
Appolina Sarah Claiborne Saul 1806-1844
Amelia Saul