For more than twenty-five years, I have planned this cemetery visit without knowing it. I traced my ancestors through records without ever standing where their stories ended.
I have always loved cemeteries. Long before genealogy gave me a reason, I was drawn to them. Something about the quiet. Something about the stone. A name carved into granite is proof that someone existed, that someone mattered enough to be remembered. Even strangers’ stones held that pull for me. My ancestors’ stones feel like something else entirely.
I have been researching my Plunkett and Dowling families for years. I have found them in census records, death certificates, newspaper notices, and city directories. I have traced them through Brooklyn’s Catholic parishes and watched them cluster, generation after generation, in the same neighborhood, the same house, the same cemetery.
And yet I have never stood at their graves.
That changes this year.
What the Digital Work Built
Several years ago I began building my families on Find a Grave, the volunteer-built cemetery database that became the foundation for this trip. I had already written about Find a Grave and virtual cemeteries in a 2025 post about cemetery research, so I will not repeat that ground here. What matters for this post is what the research produced: a detailed map of where my people rest.
The Plunketts and Dowlings are concentrated at Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn. Holy Cross opened on July 13, 1849, as Brooklyn’s Catholic population exploded with Irish famine refugees. My 2x great-grandfather Peter Plunkett (1829-1903) was part of that wave. He came from Ireland and built his family in Brooklyn, and when he died, Holy Cross received him.
The Dowlings arrived in Brooklyn around the same time. William Dowling (d. 1893) and his wife Ellen McAuliffe Dowling (c. 1841-1875) raised their children in the borough during the difficult decades after the Civil War. Ellen died young. William carried on for nearly two more decades and joined her at Holy Cross when he went.
Their son Thomas Francis Dowling (1871-1944) married Mary Plunkett, my great-grandmother, in the 1890s. Together they purchased the house in Kensington in 1905 that has remained in our family ever since. Both Thomas and Mary are buried at Holy Cross, in Olive Square, Row C, Plot 32. So are several of their siblings and children.
Over at Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, Queens, my great-grandparents Vasil Marcisak (1876-1954) and Anna Hurkala Marcisak (1888-1975) rest with several of their children and grandchildren. Calvary holds approximately three million burials and is the largest cemetery in the United States by number of interments. It is not far from Brooklyn. If I am going to be in the area, I intend to go.
What the Research Has Not Given Me
Here is the problem with Find a Grave, and with digital research in general: it tells you a great deal and shows you almost nothing.
Not one of my Plunkett or Dowling ancestors at Holy Cross has a headstone photograph on Find a Grave. Not one. I have memorial IDs, plot numbers where I was able to confirm them, birth and death dates drawn from death certificates and census records. What I do not have is a photograph of the stone itself. I do not know what the markers look like, whether they are upright or flat, whether the inscriptions are still legible, or whether some of these memorials represent graves I will be able to find at all.
Beyond the missing photographs, there are people in my Holy Cross records whose relationship to me I have not been able to confirm. The table I compiled includes several Plunketts and Dowlings buried at Holy Cross whom I cannot yet definitively place in the family tree. Were they children of Peter Plunkett and Julia Smith who died between census years, before I could find them in a record? Were they siblings or cousins who emigrated from Ireland and followed the family to Brooklyn? The stones themselves may hold the answer, or at least a clue. A birth year I do not have. A middle name. An inscription that confirms a connection the documents have not yet given me.
The House, the Trip, the Reason for the Cemetery Visit
I am planning this cemetery visit for sometime this summer or fall, and I am not planning it alone.
The base of operations will be the house Thomas Dowling and Mary Plunkett Dowling bought in 1905. My aunt, my father’s sister, still lives there. The house has been in the family for more than 120 years. I wrote about it in an earlier post and I still find it remarkable: the same address, the same family ownership, even the same front steps Thomas walked up after work in 1905.
I will sleep in Thomas and Mary’s house and then drive to their grave. I am not sure I have fully absorbed what that means.
My father, Thomas Sten, died recently. He was the son of David Sten and Julia Elizabeth Dowling, the grandson of Thomas Francis Dowling and Mary Plunkett Dowling, the great-grandson of Peter Plunkett and Julia Smith and of William Dowling and Ellen McAuliffe. Every grave I am planning to photograph at Holy Cross is his family. His people. The ancestors whose blood and stubbornness and faith ran through him and run through me. I feel their weight differently now.
What I Am Bringing and What I Am Looking For
The practical preparation is already underway. I have my target list: every memorial I have found at Holy Cross and Calvary, with plot numbers where confirmed and memorial IDs for cross-reference. I will have the Find a Grave app on my phone, logged in with photo-request notifications enabled. I will have my camera. I plan to call Holy Cross in advance to confirm plot locations before I arrive.
For Calvary, I have a head start. In 2007, nearly twenty years ago now, I wrote to the cemetery and received plot information for several of the Marcisak graves. I visited Vasil and Anna, Stephen and Paul on that trip. I had no idea then how many more family members were buried there. I will need to contact the cemetery again for the rest of the Marcisak relatives before I go.
What I am looking for is harder to list.
Photographs, yes. Confirmed plot locations. Inscriptions that might fill in a birth year or a parent’s name. Evidence that the unidentified Plunketts and Dowlings in my records connect to the family I already know.
But I am also looking for something the database cannot give me. I want to stand in Olive Square and read the names on the stones. I want to see where Thomas and Mary are buried side by side after a marriage that lasted nearly fifty years and survived two world wars and a depression and the loss of two infants. I want to find Peter Plunkett’s stone and know that I am standing where his story ended and mine, in a long and winding way, began.
I already know I am going to cry. That is not a problem. That is the point.
A TIP!
Planning a genealogy cemetery visit? Start with the digital work: build your target list from Find a Grave, confirm plot numbers through the cemetery office or online locator, and download the Find a Grave app before you go. But leave room in your plan for what the records cannot give you. Sometimes the most important thing you find at a cemetery is not the answer to a research question.
Calvary Is Not Far
Calvary Cemetery in Woodside is roughly a thirty-minute drive from the Kensington neighborhood where I will be staying. Close enough that there is no reason not to go.
I have been to Calvary before. That 2007 visit was my first real genealogy cemetery trip, and I stood at the graves of Vasil and Anna Marcisak, my great-grandparents, and at the graves of my granduncles Stephen and Paul Marcisak, both of whom died far too young. I took photographs. I stood there and thought about what I knew about them, which at the time was much less than I know now.
Twenty years of research later, I know that the Marcisak family at Calvary is considerably larger than those four graves. Brothers, sisters-in-law, cousins, children. The research I have done since 2007 revealed how many of them are there, scattered across the cemetery in plots I have been slowly piecing together.
This time I am going back not to document but to be present. To walk the ground I have only seen in cemetery records and memorial pages. To stand where I stood before, older now, with more loss behind me, and just reflect on the family I have spent so many years trying to understand.
Calvary is 365 acres. I will go prepared. But some of what I am carrying into that cemetery cannot be planned for at all.
After the Trip
This post is the before. There will be an after.
When I come home from Brooklyn, I will upload every photograph I take to the appropriate Find a Grave memorials. I will fulfill the photo requests I am able to fulfill, not just for my own family but for any open requests I encounter in the same sections. I will update my research files with whatever new information the stones provide. And I will write about what this cemetery visit revealed.
I have been researching these families for more than twenty-five years. I have found them in every kind of record there is. Now I am going to find them the old way: by showing up, walking the ground, and reading the stones.
My ancestors are waiting. I should not keep them much longer.
Your Turn
Have you made a genealogy trip to a cemetery specifically to visit your ancestors’ graves? Did you find what you were looking for, or did the visit raise new questions? Is there a cemetery on your list that you have been putting off? I would love to hear about your experience in the comments below.
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