Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Tombstone Tuesday - Hezekiah Sawtell (1703-1779)

Hezekiah Sawtell was born 2 March 1702/3 in Groton, Middlesex, Massachusetts, the son of Obadiah and Hannah (Lawrence) Sawtell. He married Joanna Wilson on 1 August 1723 in Groton. Hezekiah died 18 March 1779 in Groton.

Hezekiah Sawtell's stone stands proudly in the Old Burying Ground in Groton:


A cherub's head adorns the top of this gravestone. The inscription reads:

To the Memory of a Beloved Friend.
Here lies the Body of
Lieut. Hezekiah Sawtell
Who Departed this Life March Ye 18th
1779 in the 77th Year of his age:
in his life he was a Kind & Loving Husband,
a tender and Provident Parent, a
Friendly and Benevolent Neighbour,
Singularly Pitiful and Liberal
to the Poor, Needy and Distress'd
His life useful, his Death Lamented.
"Stop Passenger as You Go by
Remember You Was born to die.
As You are Now So Once was I
As I am Now So You Must be
Prepare For Death and Follow me."

What a beautifully carved stone? There are many well-preserved stones like this in the Old Burying Ground in Groton. Transcriptions of the stones in this cemetery are provided in the US GenWeb archives here. A book (Epitaphs from the old burying ground in Groton, Massachusetts, By Samuel Abbott Green, Arthur Bruce Coburn, Published by Little, Brown, & Company, 1878) is available on Google Books here.

I don't recall where I obtained this photograph, and others from this cemetery. I may have taken them myself on a trip to New England in 1994 or 1995, and I may have obtained them from a kind correspondent who took them and sent them to me years ago.

Hezekiah Sawtell is one of my 6th great-grandfathers, and is also a first cousin nine times removed according to the Legacy Family Tree 7 relationship calculator!

2 comments:

Linda Hughes Hiser said...

I lived in Massachusetts for a time....you gotta love the old tombstones found there! What a nice one you found.

deimos said...

My ancestor