Posted by Jeff Richman on June 25th, 2019

It is a fact of life--there is always (or almost always) someone out there who knows more than you do about something. It is pretty well known that Louis Comfort Tiffany designed stained glass windows for use in cemetery mausolea. There are several of those at Green-Wood. And, just a year ago, I was pretty impressed with my knowledge of the much less well known stone monuments at Green-Wood by Tiffany Studios. Through the work of sharp-eyed Green-Wood Historic Fund Volunteers, processing the cemetery's Burial Orders, I had learned about… Read more

Posted by Jeff Richman on May 21st, 2019

Sometimes, as we peruse Green-Wood's massive archives, with millions of documents chronicling the lives of the 574,000 souls who are interred here, something unusual catches one's eye. So it was for volunteer Jim Lambert, who recently worked for months recording the information from Green-Wood's chronological books pertaining to each of the 1400 individuals who are interred in Green-Wood's Freedom Lots--lots which offered burials for people of color in the 19th and 20th centuries. One day Jim came across the 1910 burial record for a Ronda Rangit, who was noted as… Read more

Posted by Jeff Richman on March 18th, 2019

Green-Wood is fortunate to have Tony Cucchiara as its archivist. Tony knows what he is doing. He worked at Brooklyn College for years, before retiring from there as professor emeritus. He has taught generations of archivists who work at New York's leading cultural institutions. He continues to educate budding archivists at Pratt. And for the last 10 years or so he has been working on Green-Wood's massive records--typically multiple documents that catalogue 574,000 burials and all related matters, including familial relationships, businesses, and much much more. Tony hit a new… Read more

Posted by Jeff Richman on February 12th, 2019

As Green-Wood's historian, I never know where our next discovery will be coming from. I just know that it will arrive very soon. So it was this past Friday. I was working at Green-Wood, minding my own business. But, it turns out, an e-mail had just come in to our Green-aelogy supervisor, Christina Bickford. Christina, ever conscientious, thought that I, as the cemetery's historian, might be interested in an inquiry about a doctor who had practiced medicine in Canada before his death in 1863. So she forwarded the e-mail to… Read more

Posted by Jeff Richman on November 26th, 2018

The story of the Prentiss brothers of the Civil War is one of the most fascinating tales of that event. It has it all:  brothers from a border state, with different loyalties, one going north to fight to preserve the Union, one going south to fight for the Confederacy.  Then, after fighting for their cause for several years, and with the Civil War about to dramatically end just a week later, they would both be mortally wounded within feet of each other, one leading his regiment in the attack on… Read more