As mentioned, I spent last weekend in Providence, Rhode Island, and used the Monday morning to explore four cemeteries in eastern Connecticut where ancestors of mine are buried.

These are all forebears of my great-great-grandfather William Charlton Hibbard, who himself is buried in West Roxbury near Boston. He was born in New Hampshire, as were his parents; his Hibbard grandparents, David Hibbard and Eunice née Talcott, had moved north from Connecticut in the 1770s (perhaps to avoid the war?), but their parents’ graves are all recorded, three of the four in the cemetery at Coventry CT and the fourth at nearby Windham. Earlier Hibbards vanish into the mists, but all four of Eunice’s grandparents seemed also findable; her maternal grandparents also in Coventry, her father’s father in nearby Bolton and her father’s mother (possibly) a bit further away in Windsor.

Along with my third cousins P and L, who had joined me to find our great-grandparents’ graves last year, and with the estimable Esther as official photographer (so most of the photos below are hers not mine), I set off to track down the last resting places of our forebears.

I rented an electric Kia in Providence on a one-way trip to Logan Airport, and we enjoyed the lovely autumnal drive through southern New England to Windham, where my 5x great grandmother Eliza Hibbard née Leavens is buried.

It would have been truly fantastic maybe three or four weeks earlier when the leaves were at full autumnal glory, but as it was, we really weren’t complaining; it was a crisp December day with cheerful sunshine.

Windham cemetery is quite extensive, but the older graves are concentrated near the road. It took me a couple of minutes’ frustrated roaming to remember that there is a photograph of Eliza’s grave on the excellent Findagrave website. She has a very distinctive pentagonal headstone.

Poor Elizabeth! She was married at 19, and had six children that we know of, three of whom died young; she herself died at 38, and you have to wonder if that was related to yet another pregnancy. Her fourth but oldest surviving child, David, named for his father, was our ancestor. I know nothing about her except the dates of her birth, marriage and death, and the same for her parents, husband and children; nobody who knew her in life has drawn breath since the middle of the nineteenth century; and yet I felt an electric shock of connection as I found her last resting place.

We continued our journey to find the five graves at Coventry, where we converged with P and L, coming in opposite directions from Boston and New Haven respectively. A navigation error (mine) meant that we were the last to arrive, but still in good time for the morning’s plans. The South Street Cemetery, aka the Old South Burying Ground, is much the smallest of the four we visited, and has very few recent graves.

It did not take us long to find Eliza’s husband, our 5x great-grandfather David Hibbard, and his second wife Dorcas née Throop. He lived to 1800, lucky chap, outliving poor Eliza by almost forty years. Dorcas was the same age as Eliza, and David married her less than a year after Eliza’s death; they had three more children who all survived to adulthood and have living descendants, the last born when Dorcas was 43.

L and P are half-second cousins to each other, sharing a great-grandfather, Thomas Hibbard. He was the older brother of my great-grandfather, Henry Deming Hibbard, so L and P are both third cousins of mine. All three of us are signed up to both Ancestry.com and 23andMe; the two sites disagree about whether I share more DNA with L or with P, but in any case it’s somewhere between 0.6% and 1%. You can judge for yourself if it is visible.

David and Eliza’s son, David junior, married Eunice Talcott, also from Coventry, and they moved up north to the borders of New Hampshire and Vermont, and are buried there. Like David junior, Eunice was named for one of her parents (our 5x great-grandparents); they were Joseph Talcott and Eunice née Lyman, and we found them not far away, next to each other.

Joseph Talcott fought in the Connecticut militia during the war of independence, and is listed second of the men of Coventry who participated in the first battle of the war, at Lexington in April 1775.

His grave has been adorned with a flag, presumably by local patriots.

We mused about the record of his death, “casually drowned in the proud waters of Scungamug River”. The river is easy; the Skungamaug River, as it is now spelt, runs north to south through Tolland County, in which Coventry is situated. But what does “casually drowned” mean? Are we meant to infer that his death was accidental, or suicide, or something else? A bit of googling suggests that accidental death is intended, but the fact is that this very inscription seems to be the best-recorded use of the phrase. And “proud waters”?

His in-laws, Eunice Talcott née Lyman’s parents, our 6x great-grandparents, are also not too far away in the same cemetery.

Elizabeth’s maiden name was Smith, which unfortunately makes it very difficult to trace her ancestry further back as there are just too many Smiths around. Her married name, Lyman, became a recurrent first name for boys in the Hibbard family, including my grandmother’s brother, six generations later. (Lyman was also the first name of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz; he never used it, and I have not been able to establish if he was yet another relative, but as it happens my grandmother’s name was Dorothy.)

Benjamin Talcott, Joseph Talcott’s father and therefore another 6x great-grandparent, rests in nearby Quarryville Cemetery in Bolton CT. The cemetery itself is on a rise surrounded by a drive; we parked at the first available opportunity and resigned ourselves to a long search.

But to our surprise we had parked right beside him. His headstone is by far the most dramatic of all of those we saw – it also had the easiest to read inscription, which helped. As usual, it is topped by a rather grotesque winged figure, and has a suitably chilling message.

Interpreting this was a lot of fun. The biblical quote is from Job, but the doggerel appears to be original, or at least the source is not known to Google.

A smaller memorial stone behind the larger one commemorates Benjamin’s service in Captain Rudd’s Company during the French and Indian War (which lasted from 1752 to 1763, so he would have been an elderly Sergeant given that he was born around 1702).

I was charmed by the church steeple a few hundred metres away, and the gables of the nearer farm buildings.

Finally, and a good bit further on, we reached the Palisado cemetery in Windsor, which according to Findagrave.com is the resting place of Benjamin Talcott’s wife Esther, née Lyman, another 6x great-grandparent. (Her daughter-in-law Eunice was also her second cousin twice removed.) This is a huge cemetery, still in use, with an active railway line skirting its boundaries. P took this photo of me and L trying to work out where to find the ancestral Esther, with today’s Esther offering encouragement.

And in fact it was Esther who found Esther.

Unfortunately I’m not convinced that this is the right Esther Talcott. The stone is clearly more recent than 1751, when my 6x great-grandmother died; this Esther rests beside a John H. Talcott, also undated, and a Guy Talcott whose date of death is given as February 28, 1857, aged 78, which is much too late.

Guy Talcott was the son of Daniel Talcott (1744-1824) and Eunice née Moore (1751-1838), distant cousins of our Talcott ancestors, and he had a sister, Esther, and a brother, John (middle initial not otherwise recorded). So I think these are the three Talcotts in Windsor, rather than our direct relatives. Still, it was good that we found the grave we were looking for.

We went for a very decent pub lunch at the Union Street Tavern, and then set off in our separate directions, P dropping Esther back to Providence as I needed to get straight to Logan Airport for my flight. This turned out to be a bit more hair-raising than expected as it took me ages to find out how to charge the electric car, which didn’t quite have enough oomph for the full journey; I eventually sorted it out, and arrived at the departure gate just five minutes before boarding started for my transatlantic flight. Don’t do that, folks, find out how to charge your electric car before driving it. Otherwise it was a good driving experience.

And a good day over all – many thanks to L, P and Esther for being comrades in research. We must do it again some time – I think there are some more graves to be found in a cluster near Worcester, and more again farther north around Littleton NH. In fact I have a photograph from a similar expedition in 1941, when my great-grandfather (right, with beard) and his nephew, P’s grandfather (left) found the graves of David and Eunice Hibbard’s son Lyman and his wife Rebecca there.

If it’s been done once, it can be done again.