No Luck At All
Sometimes researching the history of a community is a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle. A
key piece always seems to be missing. The Archives Committee of St. Mark’s receives
details from a variety of sources before we are able to put together anything like a
complete picture of a person or an event. Sometimes an essential detail is missing.
Mary Moriarty is researching her family history and wrote asking where James and Mary
Luck were buried. We have long been aware of this family’s association with St. Mark’s
Parish. In 1839 James had married Mary Couch and they had built a house on land
leased from the parish. In 1846 James was appointed sexton with responsibilities for
maintaining the cemetery. Five years later he still fulfilled this function and was given a
pay raise to £50 and in addition paid £6.4.0. for painting the fence.
Several years ago a photographer came to us excited about a full plate Canadian
daguerreotype of Rev. Thomas Creen that he had discovered in a second hand shop in
Picton. He had learned that this had been a gift of the Lucks to Mr. Creen who had
married them. We wrote about this discovery in St. Mark’s Storied Past.
In spite of our familiarity with many of the details of this family, we were unable to
discover any burial site in St. Mark’s cemetery. There was no reference to their name in
the card file of the cemetery plots, nor in the transcription of the headstones. We were
forced to suggest that, since this family had moved to Norham, near Trenton, perhaps
they had been buried in that part of the country. It was a bit unusual, in the nineteenth
century, to bury the dead anywhere other than near where they had died. The response to
us, however, was that they had certainly been brought to Niagara for burial. So, knowing
that they had been market gardeners, we searched in the transcriptions of the small rural
cemeteries of the Niagara region but with no success.
Then we came across a letter written to the church in 1974 inquiring about the same
grave site, but indicating that the writer had seen the Luck memorial stones in the
cemetery some years earlier, even though by the date of writing they had disappeared.
Her directions were a bit difficult for us to be certain about the part of the cemetery, but
she indicated that they were “on the right hand side as you enter the church, but near the
old fence some distance from the entrance.” If the reference is to a fence that once
surrounded graves just beyond the door of the church, the fence has long since
disappeared. Unfortunately there was no indicator of adjacent monuments to enable us to
pinpoint the site.
A thirty year old letter that by chance was not lost has provided us with the knowledge
that the family story is correct. The interments were indeed in St. Mark’s in spite of the
lack of verification in the church’s official records. It is our hope that further information
will turn up to help us identify the precise plot where this couple were buried. We still
lack that one piece of our puzzle. We would be pleased to receive information or pictures
that might assist us in responding to this family historian.