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| Autumn 1999 issue | . | The lost boys | |
LINKS: Cedar Grove Cemetery view |
That somber distinction appears to belong to William Richardville, the son of a chief of the Miami people and possibly a grandson of Jean-Baptiste de Richardville, one of the wealthiest Native Americans in this part of the country in the early 1800s. According to a ledger from the University =s early years, young William died of tuberculosis March 28, 1847, and was the first person buried in the Parish Graveyard, now called Cedar Grove Cemetery.Where in the cemetery Richardville =s remains lie, however, is anyone=s guess because no headstone bears his name.But that doesn =t mean he isn=t there. According to Sexton Tim Mosier, of the more than 10,000 bodies interred in Cedar Grove, the identities of more than 600 are unknown, the result of lost or destroyed records and the short-sighted 19th century funerary practice of marking graves with iron crosses C on which names of the deceased were painted!Another graveyard curiosity can be found in the Holy Cross cemetery north of Saint Mary =s Lake. One of the men buried there is George Lyng, who, judging by his headstone, is still alive. The concrete cross lists his date of birth C September 18, 1873 C and his vocationally acquired name, Brother Vital, but no date of death.Further research reveals that Lyng was an immigrant from Kilkenny, Ireland. The son of a Catholic farmer, he entered the Holy Cross order at Notre Dame shortly before his 16th birthday and, according to documents in the province archives, died a year later, on August 10, 1891, of unspecified causes. As near as anyone can tell, the reason that date doesn =t appear on his headstone is because officials at the order=s headquarters in France misunderstood the report mailed in on Brother Vital=s death. They thought it was about his having quit the order. For some reason, more than a hundred years has passed without the error being corrected.One of the questions on a form George Lyng filled out in applying for acceptance into the brotherhood, asked, AWill you cheerfully submit to the most humiliating trials?@He wrote, AYes.@Little did he know how long they might continue. C Meredith W. Salisbury =00
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Undoubtedly the most famous is football hero George Gipp, who succumbed to
strep throat in pre-antibiotic 1920. But the Gipper wasn