Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Category: Smaller Graveyards

  • Georg Philipp, Louis August, and Heinrich Hotz Tombstones, Greentree Cemetery

    Greentree Cemetery is a German cemetery on Greentree Road in Green Tree. (After a century of indecision, the borough seems finally to have decided to spell its name as two words—which is wrong, since the name is universally pronounced as one word. But Father Pitt digresses.)

    Here are three tombstones in a row remembering three sons of Sebastian and Maria Hotz. Louis August’s stone in the center has a small alcove that shelters a sleeping child, now quite eroded and almost unrecognizable. The dates are hard to read, and Father Pitt is not sure that he believes the dates these volunteer transcribers found in cemetery records. Georg Philipp’s stone is the most legible; he seems to have died in 1876 at the age of seven. Louis August’s is nearly hopeless. Heinrich was born in 1867 and died either in 1867 or—as the records apparently say—1887. That would make him a young adult, but everything about this triple tombstone suggests three children. Might the handwritten cemetery records have said 1867, and a later transcriber misread the date?

    Note, incidentally, that the triple tombstone appears to be one monument all set up at the same time. It is possible that the three stones were bought separately and later arranged in a row, but the whole looks too much like a carefully arranged composition to Father Pitt.

  • John Edward McIntyre Monument, St. Joseph Cemetery

    A typical zinc monument adapted to Catholic tastes by adding a big cross on top. It remembers a seventeen-year-old boy who died in 1892; it may have been bought with the intention of adding other McIntyres as they moved in, but no other names were ever added, and most of the monument is taken up with the interchangeable filler designs offered in the monument company’s catalogue.

  • Sossong Angel, St. Joseph Cemetery

    “Sossong” is not a very common name, yet in this small cemetery in Glendale (Scott Township) there are at least four different Sossong family plots. It must have been a large interconnected group of cousins. This particular plot has a marble angel as its guardian, possibly erected in 1893 when Philipp Sossong died. The angel is well preserved, though the left hand and part of the scroll with the family name are missing.

    The Sossongs’ descendants still keep up this plot, and all the Sossongs buried here have relatively recent granite headstones, possibly to replace inscriptions that became illegible. One of them was a priest, Fr. William B. Sossong, who was born in 1891, but for whom no death date has been filled in.

    Old Pa Pitt liked this angel well enough to come twice in the same day and photograph it in two different lights. That is how dedicated he is to bringing you the finest possible illustrations.

  • Giehll and Weber Monument, St. Joseph Cemetery

    Here is an interesting little document of the American immigrant experience from a small cemetery in the Glendale neighborhood of Scott Township. Father Pitt reconstructs the story this way:

    When Adam Giehll died in 1911, his wife Anna M. (Anna Maria? Very likely, since this is a Catholic cemetery) bought a monument with space for his name, her name, and the name of her mother, Anna M. Weber. The birth and death dates of Adam and his mother-in-law were filled in, but—as is commonly done when a living spouse buys the monument—Anna M. Giehll’s death date was left as a blank line, ready to be cut when the time came. (You can see the rougher, less skillful cutting of her death date quite clearly on the stone.)

    So far the whole thing is written in German. But when Anna M. Giehll died sixteen and a half years after her husband, her death date was filled in in English—the only line of English on the stone.

    For this German Catholic family, then, the line between German and English was somewhere around the First World War—which is hardly surprising. Probably the children of Adam and Anna spoke English as their first language. This is the pattern Father Pitt sees in current immigrants to Pittsburgh: the first generation speaks the language of home and only broken English, but the second generation grows up speaking English and is perhaps only marginally fluent in the parents’ language.

  • Shields Mausoleum, Edgeworth

    On a back street in Edgeworth, right next to the Shields Chapel, sits what looks like a Gothic church; but it is actually the mausoleum of the Shields family, one of the largest Gothic mausoleums in the Pittsburgh area. It has room for thirty-six interments, and it is big enough that the Grace Anglican congregation used it for services until the Shields Chapel became available. It is very rare in the Pittsburgh area for a family to build a mausoleum on its own property, but apparently no mere cemetery was good enough for the Shields family.