For Samuel Adams, seeing hundreds of defaced graves was a stark demoralization, a cruel iniquity, and an eerie misdeed. Stirred by this, he felt compelled to act. As a young child, Samuel Adams held an unusual fascination for graveyards. His kin would often accompany him to pay homage at his great-grandmother’s resting place, sparking his view of cemeteries as stark narratives of history, repositories of long-forgotten tales and treasured secrets. As the years passed, Adams, who grew up to be a historian and genealogist, felt a deep connection with the deceased and a sense of responsibility towards preserving their final abodes.
Fast forward to today, at 68, Samuel has graced more graveyards than he can possibly recall, scrubbing tombstones and honoring the departed in accordance to their faith, placing stones on Jewish tombs and palm crosses on Christian ones during the period of Easter. In November of last year, Adams made his appearance at the Sacred Threefold Cemetery, a 23-acre burial ground situated in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, nestled alongside the elevated subway line that conveys the L train to Canarsie.
The Sacred Threefold Cemetery is the final resting place of approximately 25,000 individuals, primarily blue-collar immigrants from Germany, who were devotees of the nearby Catholic parishes in their lifetime. The lives they led were humble and straightforward. Their graves parallel their lives, unostentatious, adorned not with lavish granite but with simple wooden crosses or metal markers crafted in the likeness of conventional gravestones.
Historian Samuel Adams, the Guardian of Forgotten Graves appeared first on Real News Now.
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