6/26/19 Newburyport: Going Back to Our Roots

For a few years now I’ve been wanting to take a trip to St. Mary’s Cemetery in Newburyport, MA to gather and search for some missing family history information for Nathan’s side of the family. His Grandpa Gunning’s mother, Marion Corey Gunning, and her side of the family came from Ireland to Newburyport.  Many of them are buried there, especially in one cemetery. 

Wednesday Denise and I took the boys and made the 2-1/2 hour drive from the Cape to Newburyport to see what we could find.  As we drove into the cemetery I was skeptical whether we’d find anything at all; it was a lot bigger than I thought!  But we started looking from the car, and within a few minutes found 4 family stones all in a row.  As soon as I saw them, I recalled Grandpa telling me years ago that they were all 4 together ina row.  It was a beautiful spot right next to two giant evergreen trees.  I won’t bore you with the personal details, but I know these people well from all the hours of research I’ve done, and it was so touching to finally see their headstones in person!  

Denise was so excited to find her ancestors, one of which (James Patrick Corey and Anne (McGlone) Corey) was her 2nd great grandfather and grandmother, and another (Anne Scully McGlone) her 3rd great grandmother.  We were so excited to keep finding graves that we completelyforgot to take any pictures of ourselves or the kids there, which I REALLY regret.

Denise and I split up to canvas the cemetery for other graves, and the boys ran around like crazy hooligans.  Denise found another very exciting and informative Corey family plot!

And just as we were about to give up the search,we drove around in one last ditch effort and spotted another.

It was exciting every time we found one.  We were so giddy!  After the cemetery adventure, we found some homemade ice cream at Hodgie’s.

I was excited to find pink bubblegum ice cream WITHOUT the gum pieces—that’s so rare!

After gorging ourselves on ice cream, we drove around old Newburyport, looking at the historic homes, trying to catch a glimpse of the harbor, and imagining what life may have been like inthe 1800s in this little town that used to be a bustling textile and shoe factory town.

We even drove passed a few addresses from oldcensus information to see where various relatives had lived. Some of the houses weren’t there any more, but on Spring Street we did see the townhome where Denise’s great Aunt Catherine (Corey) Page lived when Denise was a young girl.  (Driving the narrow streets, following a GPS, and dealing with kids was about all I could handle,

so we regrettably have no pictures of any of the houses either.)

We would have loved to have stayed in Newburyport many more hours to explore the little shops,

visit more sites, and even explore more cemeteries, but we needed to head home.  We got caught in rush hour evening traffic and it took over 3 hours to get home. It was a long, but successful adventure!