Children’s graves, jotted notes, and an old nickname…

Curiously, the search for Stuart Ingram Cartwright, begun in Part 1, keeps leading us back to his sisters, Emily and Edna, who died young but unlike Stuart were always remembered by the Cartwright family.

In Part 2, I mentioned that we had birth and death records for Emily and Edna, but we didn’t know where they were buried. I thought if we could find their graves, we might also find a grave for Stuart, since all we have for that elusive child is a baptism certificate.

I wasn’t sure how to go about finding burial records, but I started at the Ontario Ancestors’ London Middlesex branch, where I found links to the Ontario Cemetery Index, the Ontario Cemetery Finding Aid, and The Ontario Name Index. None of these avenues turned up anything I didn’t already know, so I wrote to the London Public Library, and a helpful librarian looked through newspapers and cemetery listing for me, but nothing came up. Following the librarian’s suggestion, I wrote to the Diocese of Huron archives, and am awaiting their reply.

In the meantime, though, my recently deceased 100-year-old Auntie Mary has surprisingly revisited this story. As news of the Mystery Baby blog posts made its way to extended family members, another descendant of George and Emily wrote to say that several years ago she had helped clear out Do and Mary’s apartment so they could move into one better suited to their old age.

“There was one room that was FULL of furniture, magazines, etc.,” she wrote, “and we had to go through it and save anything valuable like family papers, photos.” Among the items, she found a wooden box of letters and telegrams and some handwritten notes, just jottings on scraps of paper, written at a much later date for the purposes of genealogy. One of these included a note about babies Emily and Edna May, and said simply:

Mount Pleasant

Emily L. (Sissy) Born England. Died 14 mths. 1907

Edna May Born 1911. Died 1912.

Plot QB 583

I was surprised to see the nickname “Sissy,” which underscored what a loss her death must have been, not just to the parents, but to brother George, too, who’d crossed the ocean with his new little sister weeks earlier. I wondered, did the family attend these burials? Were there funerals for the girls too? My relative thought this might be the area in the cemetery where many children and babies were buried. Coincidentally, just the day before, I had been walking with my friend Anne, and telling her about Stuart. Back in the 1990s when she was in university, Anne had worked at a different Mount Pleasant Cemetery here in Toronto, and she remembered that there’d been a section for babies, and that it always got special attention from the groundskeepers.

After a bit of sleuthing, I discovered that the Children’s Garden, as it’s now known, has a heartbreaking back story that was detailed by Toronto Star writer Michele Landsberg in 1992. In the 1960s, the son of a woman named Mary Smith died at just five days old. He’d been born prematurely, and before that single tragedy, Mary had suffered five miscarriages in a row. The doctor advised the woman’s husband he didn’t think she could handle this new loss, and arranged for the child’s burial without her knowledge. Later, when she fretted the child hadn’t had a proper funeral, she was told his body had been put in a coffin with a woman who was being buried, to ensure he had a Christian burial, but that there was no way to know where the child lay. “The worst,” she told Landsberg, “was that I didn’t know where he was. I couldn’t go stand on the spot.” She grieved for this baby for years, and felt “perpetual anxiety” that something terrible would happen to her other children. She followed them to school to be sure they made it there okay, and she had nightmares that they’d been taken away from her.

Many years had passed when she told the story to some friends, who were shocked by the preposterous idea of the child being buried in a stranger’s coffin. Within days, they had clarified this detail was not true, and traced the baby’s grave to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto, in an area reserved for stillborn babies and children with no known parents or otherwise difficult family situations, like poverty. The discovery made an enormous change in Mary’s life, and eventually, with the help of others, she began to plan a commemorative garden for the area, full of native plants like sweet woodruff, highbush cranberry, and serviceberry. These she planted with her own hands, a cathartic experience that enabled her to tell Landsberg, “I don’t cry anymore. The bitterness is gone.” The garden was planted with each season in mind, so that, “like children, it [would] always be growing and changing.” Surely today it remains a special place for families of children gone too soon.

Having discovered Michele Landsberg’s article about Mary Smith, I’m touched to realize this is the same garden my friend Anne tended in her university years. It was fairly new then, and she didn’t know its history, but she went on to become a midwife, and has an intricate understanding of the griefs and joys associated with childbirth — the sweep of emotions George and Emily Cartwright experienced with the arrivals and departures of babies Emily, Edna, and perhaps Stuart, though we still know so little about him. This side trip into Mary Smith’s story, prompted by my walk with Anne, takes us a long way from those century-old tragedies, but history is a winding road, and we will make our way back using a different route, hoping for more clues to the mystery.

I have written to Mount Pleasant, London, to see what more can be learned about the girls’ burials, and to see if their brother — presuming he existed! — is there too. I would also like to know why the girls’ names don’t turn up on a search of people interred there. Are they in a children’s section like the one the Smith baby went to, and if so, how many other children lie there? Are their graves marked in any way? What led Emily and George to choose this place? Or did they have a choice?