Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: German Language

John Mendel Monument, Union Dale Cemetery

An ordinary stone, but with an interesting German epitaph. Unfortunately the last two lines are buried in the ground, and Father Pitt was unwilling to dig for them.

Ja du hast jetzt überstanden
Manche schwere harte Stunden,
Manchen Tag und manche Nacht
Hast du in Schmerzen zugebracht.

Standhaft hast du sie ertragen
Deine Schmerzen, deine Plagen…

Old Pa Pitt’s German is sketchy at best, but this is how he translates it:

Yes, now thou hast withstood
many heavy, hard hours;
many a day and many a night
hast thou spent in pain.

Steadfast hast thou borne it,
thy pain, thy plague…

This appears to be one of those circulating funerary poems of the nineteenth century that were like Facebook memes today: they keep showing up on monuments in slightly different wording, and nobody knows where they came from.

August 4, 2014
Vallowe Monument, South Side Cemetery

A recording angel sits on a tall shaft, writing in the Book of Life. The dates are in English, but the base of the monument bears an inscription from the Luther Bible: “Sondern wir glauben, durch die Gnade des Herrn Jesu Christi selig zu werden” (“But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved,” Acts 15:11).

August 3, 2014
Becker Monument, Beechview German Lutheran Cemetery

One of the grandest monuments in this half-forgotten cemetery, and one of the small number with German rather than English inscriptions. It memorializes a number of Beckers, but Jacob Becker is the only one who gets a “Hier ruhet” (“Here lies”). Are the Becker children buried elsewhere? If they are buried here, they must be among the earliest burials at this site.

Room is left to fill in the death date of Mathilda Becker, who was born in 1874 and is presumably still alive today at the age of 140. We may guess that Mathilda lived past 1907, at any rate, when the most recent date on the stone was carved. Jacob and Margaretha Becker had six children, of whom four died in early childhood, one died in adolescence, and Mathilda apparently survived them.

July 25, 2014
German Lutheran Cemetery in Beechview

In the nineteenth century, churches usually built their cemeteries outside the city. At the turn of the twentieth, when the rapidly expanding streetcar lines triggered a storm of new development all around Pittsburgh, many of those cemeteries ended up surrounded by crowded urban neighborhoods. This one in Beechview is not quite forgotten; someone comes to mow it two or three times a year, but much of it is so overgrown by now that it’s immune to the mower.

July 5, 2014