Many Werners are buried in this plot, but the statue of what could easily be a fourteen-year-old girl is probably a portrait of Stella D. Werner, who died at not quite fifteen years old in 1890. That is about the right date for this style of monument.
Iron monuments are rare, but in this little German Catholic cemetery this same ornate iron cross occurs twice. it was not a good idea from a genealogical point of view: the letters are separate pieces, and they fall off as bits of the monument rust. Today we can guess the surname “Amrhein” because the cross occurs in a group with a double granite monument, but there is not enough information to fill in the first name or the birth and death dates (18— to 188-).
This monument, festooned with Bible verses in German, marks the section of the cemetery where parish priests are buried.
A fine example of the mid-Victorian marble monument, and very well preserved: the industrial atmosphere of Pittsburgh in its full-tilt hell-with-the-lid-off phase was generally not kind to marble. As with many of the older monuments in St. Michael’s, a German Catholic cemetery, it bears inscriptions in German. (But an inscription from after World War I is in English.)
The Nusser monument in the South Side Cemetery is identical, except that there is also an ornate pinnacle; perhaps this one has lost its top.
The obelisk with a cross is peculiar to Catholic cemeteries; it is almost never found in Protestant cemeteries. Here is a typical example from St. Michael’s Cemetery, the vertiginous burying-ground of a German Catholic parish on the South Side Slopes. As with many of the older monuments here, the inscriptions are in German.
It appears that the family lost touch with this monument at some time between 1944 and, perhaps, 1960 or so; the death date of Anton Imling, born 1868, was never filled in.
