21 May 2010

Dear Friends of Spring Hill Cemetery,

Although I, unfortunately, was at home with a high fever on Friday, I am delighted to report that we did have 15 healthy volunteers participate in the workday, with Jeremy Nichols kindly acting in the "Official Sonoma County Regional Parks" volunteer role for us. Regional Parks supplied their usual and much appreciated support by delivering the equipment trailer and dump truck. Many thanks to all of you for coming out and having such a successful session. As I was not on hand myself, I will include snippets from emails I have received from those who were there.

In addition to our monthly debris clean up, weed pulling, and trash collection, we had two main objectives for the day - to replace the rotted wooden Finley headstones and to complete map measurements. I think you can see from the attached photographs, Sally and Dick Giberti did a beautiful job of recreating the rotted wooden Finley markers out of vintage redwood donated by Jerry Lites. Gloria Salander (a Finley descendant) was on hand to witness the replacement of the Finley markers. She reported to me, "Everyone there seemed to know just what they were doing and it was just a wonderful change for this plot." Many thanks for your hard work on this, Sally and Dick!

In the process of replacing the Finley markers, two new headstone bases were uncovered (see the second and third attachments). The first base was discovered as they were replacing Eva's rotted marker, just to the East of Eva's old wooden marker. Jeremy Nichols' description to me of the base finds: "We had a good time in spite of your absence and got a little clean-up done plus we installed the new wooden Finley markers and found two bases in the Finley section. One of the bases was right next to Eva's headboard and a broken child's tombstone fits in the base so that may be for Eva -- we did not cement Eva's new wooden headboard since we might some day find the rest of the headstone. The other base is a complete mystery as we were able to account for all ten Finleys in your list and this is an eleventh grave. The hole in the base is slightly larger than Eva's but it is still clearly a child's grave. It might be that one of the other headboards was misplaced or it might be an entirely new person -- perhaps another grandchild. You will have to do some more research."

The third attachment shows the position of both "new" bases. From the position of the first uncovered base and the fragment of headstone, one possibility is that Eva may have originally had a marble headstone. Possibly due to vandalism, it may have been destroyed and then replaced with a wooden marker similar in style to the other wooden Finley markers. We do have an old Finley plot map, given to me by a Finley descendant. It marks the position of 10 Finley graves (including Eva's), but does not specify whether the individual grave markers are wooden or marble. There is no mention on the Finley plot map of the 2nd base uncovered on Friday which appears to be to the north of Eva's base. The volunteers did check to see if there were other hidden bases in the area, but no others were found. Any ideas Finley descendants?

Jeremy also reported to me another find, "Jennifer Jaffe found a piece of tombstone next to George Lancina. The large piece appears to have a "J" on it. We flagged it [the site] and I put the pieces in a ziplock bag for Larry to bring to you. Maybe you will recognize it as missing from somewhere. " There are several broken McReynolds headstones in the area - I look forward to getting back to the cemetery to see if our new "J" fits one of them!

Paul Schoch, our map maker, was also on hand Friday. My husband tells me that Paul was able to complete his mapping measurements, and should soon have a real map. This will be a big step forward for us. Many thanks for all your efforts, Paul.

Friday was the last official internship session for Jennifer Jaffe (our Sonoma State University intern). Jennifer has been a pleasure to have join us - and she promises to keep coming to workdays when she can. Besides hard labor, she contributed many hours of research on Spring Hill burials in the old newspaper archives, and contacted Mike Newland, M.A., RPA, Staff Archaeologist, Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma State University and asked him to view our "infant tomb." Jennifer and Jeremy met with Mike at the cemetery on Sunday. I have yet to hear from Mike directly, but had this interim report from Jeremy, "I was able to be there on Sunday with Jennifer and the archaeologist. He agrees that the material is a soft sandstone. He wondered if it might have been used as a repository for cremains. I know that church-going people in the 1800s generally did not cremate their dead and in any case the closest crematory would have been Oakland or San Francisco. But it is a thought." Thank you, Jennifer, for all your contributions!

Our next workday is scheduled for Friday, June 18th. Please mark your calendars and come join us if you can.