Behold and See as you Pass By
as you are Now Soo once was I
as I am now You soon Will be
prepare for Death and follow me
On Saturday I went up to Dutchess County to look for a couple of ancestors. I didn't know where they were buried but I had a good idea. I know their names, and when they died, the towns they died in, and that they were Dutch. That narrowed my choices to Dutch Reformed Church graveyards that would have been active in the mid-18th century in the towns of Fishkill and Beekman. The towns have changed over the years, the township of Beekman used to cover a very large area, for example, and I only had a vague idea of where the cemeteries might be located.
I visited cemeteries in Hopewell and in Fishkill. The cemetery I found in Beekman was a Methodist cemetery and mostly post-dated my ancestors deaths. Similarly the Hopewell cemetery was established just after the ancestors would have died. The old part of the cemetery is pretty small, so it was easy to look at all the graves. No luck. There were plenty of graves old enough in the Fishkill cemetery, but none of my ancestors.
Most of the old marble tombstones were weathered to the point of unreadability. The red tombstones, which I think are sandstone, are in pretty good shape considering they are about 250 years old.
As you can tell the Dutch weren't too sentimental about death.
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