{"id":33319,"date":"2021-09-09T20:25:39","date_gmt":"2021-09-10T01:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=33319"},"modified":"2021-11-08T17:35:18","modified_gmt":"2021-11-08T22:35:18","slug":"a-genealogical-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=33319","title":{"rendered":"A Genealogical Find"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few days ago I bought In the Shadow of the United States Capitol: Congressional Cemetery and the Memory of the Nation<\/em>, a history of the historic cemetery in Washington, DC, by Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t know of this book before Sunday; then I received a email about a sale on history ebooks and, in going through the 200-odd titles, this book piqued my interest. How could it not? I have, after all, visited several times, and my ancestors have been interred there for over a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naturally, the first thing I did was to go through the photos in the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have this thing: when I see photos of Congressional Cemetery — and there’s a photographer in DC who posts images of the cemetery about once a month on Twitter — I scour them for locations I know, particularly locations connected to my family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hit pay dirt in In the Shadow of the United States Capitol<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The photo on the left (or top, if you’re on a mobile device) is the photograph from the book (screenshotted from my Kindle) taken by Elisa Forbes Pachter in the 1970s, a time when Congressional Cemetery was neglected and overgrown. It’s of the graves Mary Ann Hall (left) and her sister (right); as I explained last year, Mary Ann Hall was a Civil War-era brothel owner<\/a>, and her place of business was on what is now the National Mall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The black and white photograph matches almost exactly in angle the photograph on Hall’s Wikipedia page<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n