Last week, I was so excited to finally, after many years of searching, find the birth and death dates and grave of my great great grandfather (on the Nye side), Joseph Sears. When I was a little girl, my grandmother showed me this little teakwood carving of a New England sea captain. She told me it is a replica of this grandfather, who was the captain of a clipper ship which sailed to the Orient. Since he was gone for long periods of time, he had this carving made for his wife to remind her of him. My searches on census records found him and his family (wife Hannah (Lincoln) and two daughters, Lydia and Mary Josephine -- my great grandmother) living in Provincetown, Mass. The next census record, shows Hannah, as a widow, with her two daughters. I was never able to get more information on him, until now..........because, just this year, a volunteer with "findagrave.com"took photos of graves in the cemetary pictured below. Because of previous research, which gave important pieces of the puzzle, I know that it definitely is his grave. And from this picture, I learned for the first time, that there was another daughter, Olive, who died as a baby, and is buried next to him. Joseph Sears was born in the Azores in Portugual,as was all of his crew, who boarded in the same house in Provincetown. My father remembered how his grandmother (Mary Josephine, daughter of Joseph Sears) hated foreigners -- probably from memories living around all those Portuguese sailors. (A geneologist, who uses the same geneology search engine as we do, had run into this branch of my family tree. Even though he discovered he isn't related to my line, he kept the infrmation he found and e-mailed me, telling me where to find the grave photo on the web, and the site at which he found Joseph's death records. I am so thankful to him. (He's from R.I. too)
Joseph's grave is in the Winthrop Street Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Provincetown.
Here a painting of the cemetery from the 1800's. It'll be exciting to visit that cemetery when we go to the Cape on one of our upcoming retirement trips.
