St. Michael’s was a German parish, but it must have had a small Hungarian contingent as well, or it shared its cemetery with a Hungarian parish. This statue of Christ blessing visitors as they enter the cemetery (it is placed in the middle of a circle at the entrance) stands on a base with the inscription EGO SUM RESURRECTIO ET VITA in Latin and three other languages: German, English, and Hungarian.
This still-splendid Gothic headstone has eroded to the point where the name is illegible, at least in this light. We can just make out “Hier ruhet in Gott” as the first line, and at the bottom a birth date of 1829 (or perhaps 1828) and a death date of 1880. On the base is an epitaph that might almost be legible in different light.
This is almost certainly a marble pedestal for a large urn, now missing. By the style it looks as though this monument dates from about the time Katharina Wilbert died in 1875, which is a quarter-century before the foundation of the cemetery; so old Pa Pitt suspects it was moved here from another site. German inscriptions, common elsewhere, are unusual in the upper-middle-class Mount Lebanon Cemetery.
KATHARINA F.
WILBERT
NÉE HAAS
BORN APRIL 15, 1832
DIED SEPTEMBER 24, 1875
