Burial site of long-dead fisherman found by kin

Sep. 2—"I once was lost, but now am found" reads the epitaph on a newly placed stone for Ebenezer Devine. The words are especially apt for the fisherman who has lain in an unmarked grave in the City Home or paupers' section of Gloucester's Seaside Cemetery since his death in 1915.

Roger Devine of Nova Scotia had spent years vainly searching for his great-grandfather's resting place, finally finding it when Sharron Cohen of Lanesville made memorial pages for every scrawled name she could decipher on a map for the Langsford Street cemetery she'd been given by the city's Department of Public Works.

Cohen's passion for genealogy led her to become a volunteer contributor to Find a Grave, an online cemetery record database. Previously, she worked to trace the lineage of the lighthouse watchers at Thacher Island.

"I found the paupers' map maybe 10 years ago and put all those people on Find a Grave," she explained. "I'd been asked to take photo of a particular grave, so I went to the DPW and they handed me this map. I thought, 'Who are these other 114 people that I never knew were buried in cemetery?'"

Turns out, the cemetery's City Home section is the last resting place of those who were never identified or too poor to buy a plot and gravestone. More than a few of the interred are referred to on the City Home map only as "Unknown man killed on R.R. track" or "Child found in harbor."

"There's a lot of tuberculosis, a lot of alcohol as secondary cause on death certificates, lot of immigrants, particularly of Finnish and Nova Scotian decent," Cohen said of those interred at City Home. "They're tightly packed in, almost buried casket to casket."

Born the son of a Nova Scotia fisherman, Ebenezer "Eben" Devine was also the sibling and father of fishermen, a number of whom fished out of Massachusetts ports. His 22-year-old brother George died in 1888 when he fell from the schooner Etta Gott off Thacher Island, and his brother Lovett is buried in the Fisherman Rest section of Beechbrook Cemetery on Essex Avenue. Although he had 12 children, some of whom had settled in Massachusetts, Ebenezer's burial site was unknown to his descendants until Cohen updated Find a Grave.

In 1915, Eben Devine was reported missing by fellow crewmen from the schooner Hattie A. Heckman. Ten days later his body was seen floating in Gloucester Harbor by George Bailey, keeper on Ten Pound Island, who rowed it ashore. Despite decomposition, Devine's son Oscar identified the body, perhaps by his father's coat and the spectacles in the pocket. The medical examiner ruled it a death by accidental drowning, but a darker story has always lingered in Devine family lore: Eben Devine, known to be a drinker, was followed from a bar on the October night of his disappearance by two men with whom he'd had an altercation.

Roger Devine reached out to Cohen in 2019 after finding the online listing and the two worked to get a burial stone on the plot. Correspondence ensued; plans were laid; the pandemic interfered; but everything finally came together this summer.

Julie Nicastro of Mount Pleasant Memorials made and placed the stone on a location whose accuracy was independently agreed upon by Cohen, Mark Cole of the city's Department of Public Works, and Carol Kelly of the Cemeteries Advisory Committee.

Roger Devine contacted cousins Don and Lily Martin and Dwight Larkin, meeting them for the first time on July 17 for a Descendants Sail aboard the schooner Adventure. Later in the day they gathered around the 107-year-old grave, played recordings of Canadian-Irish songs, and sprinkled soil that Devine's father had gathered from Ebenezer Devine's childhood home in Woods Harbour, Nova Scotia.

"Roger had asked me to go but I was serving as the lighthouse watcher at Thacher Island at the time," said Cohen. "Funny enough, Thacher Island was near where one of his brother had died. I told him I'd be out there thinking of his family the entire time."

According to Kelly, the Cemeteries Advisory Committee is interested in identifying pauper sections in the city cemeteries, erecting signs, doing research, and creating accessible databases to resurrect the memory of others who, like Eben Devine, "once were lost."

"This has energized a bunch of us to do something with that paupers' lot," said Cohen. "The Cemeteries Advisory Committee would like to form a "Friends of" group for it. I'm researching for a set of biographies for those who are buried there. They didn't have much of a break so all the more reason for their names to be known."

Staff writer Mike Cronin contributed to this story.