In addition to selling cemetery lots, scheduling burials and maintaining paperwork for Burlington’s three city-owned cemeteries, sexton Holli Bushnell is digitizing cemetery records, which date back to the early 1800s. Her predecessors and volunteers had chipped away at the task, entering information from alphabetized burial cards into a computer database. They’d gotten as far as the Ms when Bushnell took over early last year.
She soon noticed a fairly common practice. Some women’s first names didn’t appear on the cards. They were recorded only as their husbands’ wives: Mrs. Hiram Wilkins, Mrs. David Anderson, Mrs. Clifford P. Bacon.
“I got mad,” Bushnell said. And she got to work, delving into Vermont vital records, findagrave.com, newspapers.com and ancestry.com to retrieve the names, update the records and cement each woman’s place in history. A flurry of typing can usually turn up a first name — sometimes middle and maiden names as well. Bushnell, who is still working on the project, enters them all into the database and then handwrites them onto the cards. “These women existed,” Bushnell said. “Even if their information is on a stone, they deserve to exist in our paperwork, too.”
Bushnell calls them the Lost Ladies of Lakeview, though her project also includes those buried in the much-smaller Greenmount and Elmwood cemeteries. She has completed the 20,000 burial cards — including updating the work of her predecessors — and moved on to the cards recording the ownership of burial lots, many of which have the same problem.
“This is my own way of sticking it to the patriarchy.” Holli Bushnell
So far, she’s identified nearly 100 women. In addition to adding their full names to city records, she calls them out on her Facebook page and in TikTok videos, reintroducing them to society in a fashion they never could have fathomed.
“Eva Phyllis Yandeau Bean, no longer just Mrs. John Bean,” she posted on Facebook on March 8, International Women’s Day, “you’re a person with a name again and you’re remembered.”
“Capitola E Rabideau Blow and Theodorah Capitola Blow Kingman,” began another post, “a mother and daughter who are no longer only their husbands’ wives.”
Still another: “Hannah Wilson Woodbury and Pauline Livona Darling Woodbury, you were more than the wives of powerful men.” Pauline’s husband was a Vermont governor in the late 1800s, Bushnell noted. “You can google it if you want to know what his name was.”
Most women’s first names do appear on their grave markers, but Bushnell said looking there is a last resort. Lakeview Cemetery on North Avenue, where her office is located, has more than 15,000 graves on 30 acres. She has to drive around the cemetery to check the stones, a time-consuming and sometimes futile endeavor. When her efforts fail, Bushnell crowdsources on Facebook, where her friends include avid researchers.
Including full names in city records is an important aid for genealogical research. Bushnell gets one or two calls a week from people looking for their ancestors. “If I don’t have that information on a burial card or in my database,” she said, “I can’t help them.”
Records are incomplete for Burlington’s two older cemeteries: Greenmount, established in 1764 on what is now Colchester Avenue, and Elmwood in the Old North End, which was started as the “poor lot” around 1800.
Bushnell, 40, has never lived more than a mile from a cemetery. Growing up in Rochester, Vt., she practiced choir songs in the cemetery next to her home, built fairy forts near its gravestones and listened to music on her Walkman while balancing on the narrow stone borders that outline family lots.
“I come from a long line of strong women,” Bushnell said. “My mom was the main breadwinner for my family growing up.” Before becoming a teacher, her mother, Susan Bushnell, was the only woman among 12 Whirlpool appliance sales reps whose territory spanned five states. She was the Vermont manager. Holli’s dad, Russell, was the stay-at-home parent. Her maternal grandmother “raised six kids on no money in rural Maine,” according to Holli. One of her great-grandmothers lived on Matinicus Rock, an isolated lighthouse station 25 miles off the coast of Rockland, Maine, and another was likely the first woman to cast a vote in Maine. “So I’m pretty passionate about women’s rights,” Holli said.
She earned a degree in ethnomusicology and worked for 13 years for a woman-owned clothing company, where she became director of operations.
In 2018, Bushnell started working for the City of Burlington. She calls it “the dream job I never knew existed.” It was advertised as a full-time position, split between the city clerk’s office and the cemetery. “And I’m pretty sure most of the people who interviewed for the job were interested in the clerk’s office part of it,” she said.
Bushnell tolerated that part of her role for a few years but now works solely for city cemeteries. The job allows her to indulge her interest in historic cemetery restoration. Lakeview, established in 1871, is a Victorian lawn park cemetery, designed to look like a park with purposefully placed trees and shrubs. Families used to arrive by carriage or trolley for Sunday picnics amid its 90 species of trees and drooping hydrangeas heavy with rose-gold blooms. The cemetery’s recently restored Louisa Howard Chapel is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Bushnell still records new burials on paper — in the city’s clothbound “burial book,” and on cards stored in a six-by-10-foot fireproof room steps away from her desk. Between appointments, she pulls old lot cards and enters their information into the database. Many lot owners were women, Bushnell said. “The men died first,” she explained. “Some of these women survived the death of several husbands who were buried in their lots, and they’re still just known as Mrs. Their Husband’s Wife.” She’s seen such entries made as late as the 1980s.
Spotting so many recorded that way sends her online to vent. “I’ve had almost a dozen nameless ladies today,” she wrote on Facebook on February 23. “So many I haven’t even been able to keep track to post them. I realize there was a time when being known as Mrs. So-and-So was respectable and even desirable, but the crushing, casual misogyny of this female erasure gives me serious rage. THE WOMEN OWN THE DAMN LOTS! WHY DIDN’T WE RECORD THEIR NAMES?!?!?”
Card by card, Bushnell sets the record straight. “This is my own way of sticking it to the patriarchy,” she said, softening the language she uses on Facebook. She recounts her particularly long and winding searches in TikTok videos, which typically end the way she concluded the one about Mrs. Ernest M. Center: “Welcome back, Lila, we’re glad to have you.”
But Bushnell can’t find them all. Mrs. Nathaniel Wallis Bell, for one, continues to elude her. She purchased a lot at Lakeview in 1915 or before.
Mrs. Ross Elliott Adams’ case required significant sleuthing. She died in 1937. Even her death certificate identified her as Mrs. Ross E. Adams. “That one really hurt,” Bushnell said.
So she headed to Lakeview Section C, Lot 57, where she found Adams’ marker, a small rectangular stone, nearly flush with the ground, inscribed: “Love that cannot die.”
Her name was Truth — Truth Cathell Adams.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Lost Ladies of Lakeview Cemetery | Holli Bushnell is on a mission to give dead women back their names”
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This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2024.
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