School Pins and Rings ~ 52 Ancestors #38

Recently, my brothers and I were going through some items that had come from my mother's collection of family treasures.

Some items had symbols on them that needed to be deciphered.

The first items were relatively easy to decipher. This pendant has the Greek letters Beta Theta Pi. It is just under an inch in diameter and is stored in this small leather case.

Grandfather Lowell Townsend Copeland attended Northwestern University in the early 1920s. He was a proud member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. I shared information from his school yearbook at What Else You Can Find in Yearbooks.

Copeland Cenotaphs in Maine ~ 52 Ancestors #37

A cenotaph is a cemetery marker placed in honor of a person whose remains are elsewhere.

I have a few ancestors who have what appear to be two burial locations, but it turns out that they are buried in one place and have a cenotaph in another.

My second great-grandmother, Sarah (Lowell) Copeland, was born in Calais, Maine, in 1833, living there until the death of her husband, Henry Clay Copeland in 1912 (in Calais). Soon after, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to live with her daughter, Katherine (Copeland) Dunbar and her husband, William Dunbar. When she died on January 9, 1916, her remains were buried in the Copeland-Dunbar plot (Cherry Avenue, Section 6, Lot 49) in Forest Hills Cemetery, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston, not too far from Cambridge.

S. L. C.
1833 - 1916

1796 Deed, Moses Hull to Stephen Pyle ~ 52 Ancestors #36

FamilySearch Full Search Text is a wonderful new resource, released just over six months ago, and it's quite a genealogical rabbit hole. Some Canadian records have recently been added and among several other deeds naming Stephen Pyle, I found one from 1796 in which my fourth great-grandfather, Moses Hull, sold land to his future son-in-law, my third great-grandfather, Stephen Pyle. 

From Guysborough Land Records. 1810-1818 (though many are from the 1780s and 1790s).