When Father Dan Meyer of Holy Angels Church conducts the All Souls Day Service on November 4, he will be marking the 110th anniversary of the dedication of St Henry’s Memorial Chapel.
The New Bedford stone chapel, designed in the Victorian Gothic style, is the memorial for the 4,000 unidentified people whose remains were reinterred under it when they were moved from St. Henry’s, Dayton’s original Catholic cemetery, in the 1890s. The first burials had taken place in St Henry’s in 1844. By 1872, many of the original families had died out or were financially unable to claim their ancestors gravesites. Floods and ravages of time had left some graves unmarked or stones unreadable. Records for the lots were handwritten and largely unreliable. More than 2,000 marked graves were moved to new locations in Calvary Cemetery during the same period.
When Father Dan Meyer of Holy Angels Church conducts the All Souls Day Service on November 4, he will be marking the 110th anniversary of the dedication of St Henry’s Memorial Chapel.
The New Bedford stone chapel, designed in the Victorian Gothic style, is the memorial for the 4,000 unidentified people whose remains were reinterred under it when they were moved from St. Henry’s, Dayton’s original Catholic cemetery, in the 1890s. The first burials had taken place in St Henry’s in 1844. By 1872, many of the original families had died out or were financially unable to claim their ancestors gravesites. Floods and ravages of time had left some graves unmarked or stones unreadable. Records for the lots were handwritten and largely unreliable. More than 2,000 marked graves were moved to new locations in Calvary Cemetery during the same period.
