High Street Cemetery · Hingham, Massachusetts · est. 1681
The stone tells us they were here.
The records help us understand who they were.
A quiet attempt to recover the real lives behind the stones at one old burying ground, and, more than that, to bring you to the actual grave where each person rests.
An encounter to begin with
Three Whiting men married three Fearing sisters and raised their families along one road at Liberty Plain. The memorial chapel that still stands in this cemetery carries their name, and near them rests an infant of the family, Albert Whiting Caryl, who did not see his second year.
Walk the Whitings and Fearings, six stones, about twenty minutes →Ways in
- Walk one family The Whitings and Fearings of Liberty Plain, two families joined by marriage, gathered now in one ground. Six stones, about twenty minutes.
- The oldest souls here · 67 The deepest end of the record, Hingham men and women born before 1750, when the town was young and the country not yet imagined.
- The children · 183 Those who died before they were grown, a fact carried plainly by the two dates on their stones, and the heaviest part of any old burying ground.
- Families gathered together The Cushings, Towers, Herseys and more, whole kin networks resting in the same ground, their connections mapped.
- Explore the grounds A map of every grave whose place is actually recorded, switch to satellite to see them over the land itself.
- Still unresolved · 107 People we have likely, but not certainly, matched to an 1893 genealogy entry. The names repeat; we show these as open questions, not settled facts.
Every person known to rest here has a page, 2,353 of them. Not every page is a full life; many hold only a name and two dates. That is the honest state of the record, and we say so rather than invent the rest. We reconstruct lives; we do not simulate people. Read the charter →