3 November 1905 – 9 May 1919 Charley Pochik was the youngest of three named children of Joseph and Elizabeth (Sebysten) Pochik, immigrants from Austria-Hungary. Joseph immigrated at the age of 31 in 1896 and Elizabeth immigrated at the age of 21 in 1900; the two married two years later in April 1902. They had […]
5 April 1881 – 23 April 1962 Fannie was born in Latvia a few years before the “Russification measure” began in 1887. In January of 1905, Russian army troops opened fire on demonstrators in Riga, killing 73 and injuring another 200 people. A revolution also took place in the Baltic region that same year. It’s […]
11 June 1847 (Aldeburgh, Suffolk) – 5 August 1929 (London) Millicent Garrett Fawcett was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement in England, heading up the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), but most Americans, at least, won’t have heard of her. I consider myself not a scholar of the UK and US suffragist […]
11 September 1870 – 2 June 1928 The story of John Lavezzorio was fairly easy to discover as his death was written up in the Chicago Tribune, and unfortunately it is a tragic one. Lavezzorio was born in Genoa, Italy, to a family of laborers but was brought to Chicago by his father at the […]
Captain, Chicago Fire Deparment 26 January 1849 – 19 December 1903 This fantastic headstone is in the middle of its section – a tree stump hidden in a forest of headstones — and I didn’t spot it after all these years of visits until just this past week. At first glance, it looks like just […]
15 March 1909 – 4 March 1987 “Heroine in the Struggle” Born in New Orleans to a stalwart and vocal union man, Woods performed her first protest at the age of ten when she refused to sing the national anthem after she realized she and her siblings were forbidden to play in the park they […]
Clara Diana Shaw Kennedy 1855 – January 1902 James Frederick Shaw Kennedy 1849 – 24 November 1901 This is the coffin of the Clara Diana, kept in a building that backed up to the wall between the cemetery and the church beyond in West Highgate Cemetery. There were stacks of old coffins in this dark […]
Mary Gentile 8 December 1863 – 30 June 1951 Michele Gentile 4 December 1865 – 4 February 1930 I was not able to find out much about this couple as they don’t show up in the census or any other public records that I can be certain are referring to them until the 1930 census. […]
Herman Gehrt 29 January 1857 – 10 July 1920 Sophie Fahs Gehrt 17 December 1863 – 18 May 1940 I absolutely love this headstone and had not seen one like it prior to the Gehrts but have since seen similar examples in others’ photos. It seems odd that such grand headstones could be catalog options, […]
1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849 My favorite headstone in Pere Lachaise is Chopin’s. I was there while someone was working on touching up the details on the memorial, painting the engraved words so they would be sharp and readable (you can see both the worker and the work they had completed so far […]