Sarah Henrietta Whiting Caryl

Sarah Henrietta Whiting was born in 1849 and died in 1929, eighty years that spanned the Civil War, the long Victorian decades, and the first World War. For a long time the honest answer to whose daughter was she? was that we did not know. The 1893 History of Hingham answers it: she was a daughter of Albert Whiting, the master mason of Liberty Plain, and his wife Sarah Gilkey Fearing. The chapel that still stands in this cemetery was raised in her parents’ memory; she grew up in that family.

She married Alexander Hamilton Caryl Jr. and carried the Whiting name into the Caryls, and it is in the Caryl lot, set among her birth family, that she lies. Her name is also how the families are joined: the gravestone of her infant son records the bond plainly, Albert Whiting, son of Alex. H. & Sarah H. He was born in 1871 and died the next year, named for his grandfather the builder.

This much is already certain and already heavy: she outlived that child by fifty-seven years, and kept his small stone beside her own family’s. Whatever else the records will one day add to her eight decades, the shape of them is here, a daughter of one Hingham family, a wife in another, and a mother to a grave she tended most of her life.

Family as recorded on Find a Grave

Albert Whiting1810–1891also hereSarah Gilkey Fearing Whiting1814–1894also here

Sarah Henrietta Whiting Carylm.Alexander Hamilton Caryl Jr1847–1927 (m. 1870)also here

Albert Whiting Caryl1871–1872also hereChristine Caryl1873–1908also hereAnnie Fearing Caryl1874–1935also hereAlexander Hamilton Caryl Jr1885–1913also here

SiblingsAlbert Turner Whiting1833–1909 · George Franklin Whiting1837–1840 · George Whiting1857–1947

Relationships are as recorded on Find a Grave.