When Bev and I first saw this grave marker a few months ago, it really made our hearts ache. How much someone must have hurt at a terrible loss. I indicated to Bev how wonderful the gospel knowledge we have of the resurrection is and the part death plays. We receive great comfort in knowing that through making and keeping covenants, families can be together forever. I have great-grandparents who are buried in this cemetery, however, their markers were so old as founders of Hingham that they can't be located or readable. I thought as I saw this angel of grief that I was probably not related. I took a picture on our first visit and did a little research and found that Maria Louisa Barnes is buried here, and her husband was so broken-hearted that he had this marker placed in her memory. I found out that she is related to me. She is my 5th cousin. I did more research and found that some of her children were not sealed to her and we were excited to do that work in the Boston Temple. We are hopeful that it will bring joy to both her and her husband.

Maria Louisa Barnes (1828–1891) | Person | Family Tree | FamilySearch

(There is more to this story - see below)

Hingham Mass Cemetery Maria Louisa Barnes My 5th cousin

Rome Italy
Original Sculpture of "Angel of Grief" by her husband William Wetmore Story for his wife Emelyn Story in Campo Cestio Protestant Cemetery, Rome
Emely Eldredge Story is Glen Parker's 6th cousin
Emelyn Eldredge (1820–1894) | Person | Family Tree | FamilySearch

WILLIAM WETMORE STORY (FEBRUARY 12, 1819 – OCTOBER 7, 1895) WAS AN AMERICAN SCULPTOR, ART CRITIC, POET, AND EDITOR.

SUSAN WALLACE

The Angel of Grief

Published March 11, 2013

“The loss of the wife of his youth, whom he survived but a year, was a bitter blow; and with her passed his interest in affairs. It was only when his children suggested that he should make a monument to her memory that he consented to resume work; the design he chose was the Angel of Grief, and it is wrought to exquisite finish…

“When this was done he left the studio never to return. The illness which began shortly afterward was long and severe. Soon he was forced to stay almost continually in his room, and strength waned till time became a burden too grievous to be borne. His best lover would not have held him back from the unseen land of which he wrote so tenderly.”

Story died in October of 1895, just a year after Emelyn’s death. The monument he created for her marks their graves in Rome and became one of the most powerful and touching illustrations of love and loss in the Victorian era.

The Old Ship Church (also known as the Old Ship Meetinghouse) is a Puritan church built in 1681 in Hingham, Massachusetts. It is the only surviving 17th-century Puritan meetinghouse in America. Its congregation, gathered in 1635 and officially known as First Parish in Hingham, occupies the oldest church building in continuous ecclesiastical use in the United States. On October 9, 1960, it was designated a National Historic Landmark and on November 15, 1966, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.^[2]^[3]

Old Ship Church is, according to The New York Times, "the oldest continuously worshiped-in church in North America and the only surviving example in this country of the English Gothic style of the 17th century. The more familiar delicately spired white Colonial churches of New England would not be built for more than half a century." Within the church, "the ceiling, made of great oak beams, looks like the inverted frame of a ship," notes The Washington Post. "Built in 1681, it is the oldest church in continuous use as a house of worship in North America."^[4]

The most distinctive feature of the structure is its Hammerbeam roof, a Gothic open timber construction, the most well-known example being that of Westminster Hall. Some of those working on the soaring structure were no doubt ship carpenters; others were East Anglians familiar with the method of constructing a hammerbeam roof.