Reflections

I was nine years old in 1936 when I first visited Greenwood for my grandmother’s burial. She had lived with one of her sons in Harrisburg, so I had only met her once or twice. Afterwards the only time I saw the cemetery was when I passed by on the trolley to and from Frankford. Then in 2000, when my daughter and I visited on a genealogy search, we were shown the graves of my grandmother and grandfather. That day or later we also discovered the graves of: four of my father’s siblings who had died very young and of whom I had never heard of; one of my aunts; and Charles Linde, a cousin of my father and a lawyer who apparently was involved in the founding of cemetery. Some records seem to indicate that in the 1870s or 1880s the cemetery’s business office was located in his home on 6th Street in Philadelphia.

During that visit in 2000 my daughter and I were both concerned about the records book, because it was lying open on a table with bright sunlight streaming in on it. Worried that the sun was fading those records, I joined the Friends of Greenwood to preserve that information. As I gather the individual names together alphabetically, looking back a hundred years there are events in people’s lives that are sad but interesting: a family of four that drowned, a soldier killed in action in Korea, a Medal of Honor recipient, Civil War veterans, 1918 Flu victims and many children who never became adults because of diseases which we don’t hear about today because of vaccines and treatments unknown at the time.

Howard Linde, 82

Graduate of Clara Barton Elementary School and Olney High School
Friends of Greenwood Director