History In Stone

By ANNE BUCKLEY

The records of 150-year-old Calvary Cemetery will be computerized in a daunting process to begin later this year. The operation has been planned for some time, but it was important to find a program that would create "a strictly historical database," in the words of Anthony V. Roina, not one based on financial information such as sales and commissions. Roina, the first layman to hold the position of managing director of Calvary and Allied Cemeteries, is fascinated by the history of the Church of New York and its people that is written in the grave markers of the huge cemetery. A hands-on manager who stops on his rounds to talk with the workers in the four "allied" cemeteries, he is endlessly touched by the sorrows he reads in the engraved names and ages--little children who died in the crowded tenements of Irish immigrants; young servicemen who fell in World War II...

A moment of U.S. history commemorated in Key West, Fla., last weekend has a link to Calvary Cemetery located in Queens. A 21-gun salute was fired in memory of the 266 sailors who died in the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor 100 years ago, and children placed daisies on the graves of the 24 who were brought to Key West for burial. The link? The hero chaplain of the Maine, the ship that launched the Spanish-American War, was Msgr. J.P. Chadwick, whose remains lie in Calvary Cemetery.

Other vignettes of history emerge in the final resting places of Alfred E. Smith, a Governor of New York who became the first Catholic candidate for the presidency of the United States; Gen. Michael Corcoran and Col. Timothy O'Meara, killed in the line of duty in the Civil War; and Mary Louise "Texas" Guinan, a celebrity of the Prohibition era. Two senators from New York are buried there, James A. Gorman and Robert F. Wagner, whose son became New York City's mayor. So are Lorenzo De Ponte, librettist for Mozart, and Steve Brodie, who survived that famous leap from the Brooklyn Bridge.

But Tony Roina points out the graves of "ordinary people," marked by simple stones with dates from the Depression years, and finds there "the strength of the archdiocese." An affable man rarely seen without a smile, he mourns as he walks among the graves of the victims of the great influenza epidemic. He sees family plots with markers for children who died 12 or 18 months apart. In one year, 1918, he told me, there were 23,023 burials in Calvary, most of them flu victims. In one month, October, there were 4,497. Funeral processions, some led by horse-drawn wagons, crossed the Williamsburg Bridge one after the other during an entire day.

Since the first burial, that of one Esther Ennis, on Aug. 4, 1848, almost 2 million people have been interred or entombed in the 365-acre cemetery, more than triple its original size. Data is contained in three books: one lists locations of graves, one has information on deeds, the other on interments. When someone is looking for the grave of, say, Mary Murphy, who died sometime between 1920 and 1930, every year has to be checked, and maybe all the information that's found is "Mary Murphy, 56." Says Tony Roina, who learned to love cemeteries when he was a little kid playing in the graveyard of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral on Mulberry Street near his home, "You get scared that you might give people the wrong information." So, on with the computerization of history--of a people and of the persons who were part of it.

He thinks of "the things that go on forever--grief, joy, the same committal service," binding those individuals together. There was the burial of two Missionaries of Charity in 1996 when 150 people including three busloads of sisters stood in total silence "that was almost eerie," he said. Then came the sounds of a woman sobbing on her knees at a grave 100 feet away. Two women left the group and walked over to her, knelt and hugged her.

"That's the kind of thing," said Tony Roina, who accurately describes his job as a ministry.