Tombstone Tuesday

Dominick Sharkey was one of my maternal great-great grandfathers.  He came from Ireland but I have not been able to track down exactly where.  He and his wife Honora immigrated to Syracuse, NY.  They had a number of children including my great-grandfather James (father of the Chess Maven Kate Nye). 

This photo was taken in St. Agnes Cemetery, Syracuse, NY around 1995.  James Sharkey is also in this family plot but his grave is unmarked.  He died suddenly at aged 29 the year before his father but that's another story.

Unlike my Cass side, I don't know what any of the Sharkey relatives looked like.  The only thing we know for sure is some of them had to have had dark, red hair.


I remember finding this grave.  St. Agnes is a very large, old cemetery in a sylvan setting.  Well, it felt wooded and secluded because I was by myself and slightly nervous since I saw no other living person around me.  The graves where I was were, for the most part, old and unvisited.  As unsettled as I was though I remember feeling absolutely awed to be standing in the middle of a family that I never knew simply because we fell on different eras of a time line but who were mine nonetheless.  And, I was theirs.  I recalled a lovely chant I heard once "What is remembered cannot die" and I felt in that moment, in finding them and speaking their names aloud, they were among the living again in some way.

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