Freeborn Balch, the topic of this post, was my 7th great-grandfather. He is one of three Freeborn's in my Balch genealogy. This is another tombstone in which I needed help in locating before I went to the cemetery this summer. The photos from FindAGrave were excellent, but when I saw how huge the cemetery was, I decided to contact the cemetery. Their office was off-site, and the employee didn't seem to know the cemetery at all. She was helpful tho, and send me a map of sorts...a screen shot from Google earth. Since I didn't know the stone was on a hill, and the map was so out of focus, her help didn't help at all!
A nice sunny summer day can present problems if the stone is in the shade, as mine was. The Wenham Cemetery is in Wenham, Essex Co., Massachusetts.
HERE LYES BURIED
FREEBORN BALCH WHO
DEPARTED THIS
LIFE THE 12th JUNE
MDCCXXIX AND IN THE
70TH YEAR OF HIS AGE
I looked for the footstone first, because I thought it would be the easiest to find. It looks tall in the FAG photo, but it turns out is was very small. Photos taken by others can be deceiving. I took a lot of pictures, and liked the black and white best.
Short footstone in the foreground, behind the headstone.
There were two other Balch stones next to Freeborn. One for Skipper Balch and the other for Sarah Balch, children of Freeborn and his 3d wife, Elizabeth Fairfie. This past weekend, I located Elizabeth's grave site in an old cemetery, in another town...a cemetery with the best of the best cemetery records.
Skipper Balch and Sarah Balch, both died young.
Partial view of the cemetery. The oldest stones are up the hill on the left. Below is the FindAGrave photo I used.
I recently found a paper written by Jack E. Hauck, for the town with the title of A History ofWenham Cemeteries. It could have helped me locate Freeborn, if I had seen this earlier because there was a pretty good map of the cemetery.
