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

Edward Randolph Gay Married Two of My Cousins

Edward Randolph Gay was born in September 1898 to Edwin Francis Gay and Louise Randolph. In 1902, his father started teaching at Harvard, and in 1906 became Professor of Economic History. He was the first Dean of the Harvard Business School from 1908 to 1919 and was president of the New York Evening Post from 1920 to 1923. [1]

Edward graduated from Harvard University in 1919 and from the Business School in 1920. He served in World War I. [2]

By 1923, he was an assistant dean of Harvard College. Although Ancestry's Yearbook collection doesn't currently include Harvard University's 1919 yearbook, it does include 1923, with Edward's photo on the page with the other deans of the college.

Harvard Class Album 1923 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1923), p. 11; image, "U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-1999," Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 22 September 2019)

Edward married Rose Dunbar, on 20 July 1923, at Northeast Harbor, Maine. The Boston Globe description of the wedding is full of Harvard references. Edward's best man was Charles Franklin Dunbar, a Harvard junior, and Rose's brother. [see note 2]

Rose's paternal grandfather, Charles F. Dunbar, founded the department of political economy at Harvard, was dean of the college and, later, dean of the faculty. [see note 2]

Charles and Rose's mother was Katherine Copeland, younger sister of Lowell Copeland (my great-grandfather), and Charles Townsend Copeland, Harvard English professor. Katherine died just over a year later. Rose was my first cousin twice removed.

However, by May of 1925, Edward and Rose Dunbar were divorced, as he married Rose (Greeley) Pritchard, as her second husband, in Santa Ana, California. [3] She was my half first cousin twice removed.

Rose Greeley was the adopted daughter of Louis May Greeley and his wife Anna Lowell Dunbar.

With all the repeating names and multiple marriages, I had to draw a picture to see how Edward Randolph Gay's wives were related to my grandfather, Lowell Townsend Copeland.

When Great Great Aunt Katherine died

My great grandfather, Lowell Copeland (1862 - 1935) had an older brother, Charles T. Copeland (1860 - 1952) and a much younger sister, Sarah Katherine Copeland, known as Katherine. I had known for a long time (from the Copeland Genealogy and the Lowell Genealogy) that she was born on October 15, 1874 and that she married her second cousin, William Harrison Dunbar. (His mother was a Copeland.)

However, only recently did I find out when she (and her husband) died, and it was in part thanks to Find-A-Grave!

Find A Grave, courtesy S. Esposito

A volunteer in Calais, Maine, had set up memorials on Find-A-Grave for several of my Copeland ancestors and extended family. See the Find-A-Grave memorial for Katherine, which has links to memorials of her parents and other family members. I have included the photo of the stone here; it includes names of several family members, including William H. Dunbar and his wife Katherine. Note that I have had the memorials transferred to me and I have updated the Find-A-Grave information about Katherine since doing additional research about her.

I had already known that Katherine died between 1920 and 1930 because I found the family (Katherine, husband William and three children) in the 1920 census (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), and in 1930, William was listed (at the same address in Cambridge) as widowed. From the gravestone, I learned that Katherine died in 1924. This narrowed down my search parameters to find out exactly when she died.

I went to one of my favorite newspaper sites, GenealogyBank, and searched for Katherine Dunbar in 1924 and found three notices from the Boston Herald about her death on September 13, 1924.