Tom Jones was out wandering Mount Hope Cemetery picking up sticks and branches during a recent windstorm when he said he discovered something among the roots of a freshly fallen tree.
It was the gravestone of Edna Goodman, who was born in 1892 and died in 1918. The ground around it had formed a mound that almost completely consumed the gravestone.
“The wind was twisting all sorts of different directions,” said Jones, a volunteer with the non-profit Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery.
“That's what I think did it, because a lot of the time the wind comes out of the west and the trees are used to that,” he said, standing next to the plot where it happened. “That day I was out here and the winds were just back and forth, back and forth. So, just an old tree that couldn't take it any longer, that's all.”
Jones, an amateur arborist, identified the tree as a Norway Maple, an invasive species. It’s not clear how long Goodman’s headstone had been hidden, how long the tree had been growing, nor how it got there — whether intentionally planted or otherwise. It appeared to have been ripped from the earth by its upper roots.
A photograph taken in 2022, published on the website FindaGrave.com, shows a sliver of the top of her headstone with the engraving “sister” barely visible under grass and leaves.
“There are many trees that over the years have kind of swallowed up parts of a stone a little bit, and that's just, it's not really from neglect, it's just the nature of things,” said Chris Petote, secretary with Friends of Mt. Hope. “Trees grow, if something's near it, it's going to kind of get absorbed into it.”
She and other volunteers with the group, plus a growing crowd of intrigued strangers on the internet, are piecing together the mystery of who Goodman was, how she died, and what became of her family.
Petote holds up a piece of notebook paper with cursive notes written in blue ink. At the top is written: “Edna Amelia Goodman Allen,” and what follows are notes from what she and others have gleaned from a University of Rochester database that includes cause of death, and the website FindaGrave.com.
“I'm not a historian, I just pretend to be one,” Petote said. “She died of what they called volvulus, which was basically, in a nutshell, an intestinal obstruction. And unfortunately, she left behind her husband and a son.”
The son, Jack, would have been about 3 years old at the time, based on the records Petote dug up.
“Let's see,” she said, looking over her notes. “I found out her mother was of German descent. Her mom and her dad are here, as are her grandparents for her mother.”
The cemetery resides on glacially formed hills and valleys. It was founded in1838, during the Victorian Era, and served as a public park as well as an eternal resting place for the deceased.
But as Edna Goodman shows, this place is still very much alive. Many gravestones around hers are currently concealed under the fallen tree.
“We do want to kind of pretty it up,” Petote said. “We want to get the landscape fixed a little bit better, and we also want to make sure that the stone is cleaned and set properly.”
Christine Klein, president of Friends of Mt. Hope, isn’t surprised a volunteer with the group discovered Edna Goodman’s return to the light of day.
“There's more here than we know. There's more history and more to discover,” Christine Klein said. “For a place where you have all these people buried, it's a living place. It's alive with history. It's alive with nature. It's alive with art and architecture.”
“I think that it just is another lesson,” she added. “We're still alive ... even after death.”
