Alum Brings to Life the Stories of Long-Forgotten Bostonians
Used through the 1850s, Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in the North End is the final resting place of over 10,000 people. Photo via iStock//APCortizasJr
Alum Brings to Life the Stories of Long-Forgotten Bostonians
Kelly Thomas (GRS’99) oversees the city’s Historic Burying Grounds Initiative
In Boston’s Granary Burying Ground, established in 1660 on Tremont Street, a heavy slate gravestone bearing a single name had been partially hidden beneath the soil and brush for more than a century. The epitaph reads, Here Lyes Body of Boston, Aged 70 Years, deceased February the 28, 1728. The death’s head—a decorated skull—is carved at the top.
Kelly Thomas noticed the marker earlier this year while checking on the site as director of Boston’s Historic Burying Grounds Initiative. Her research connected it to a formerly enslaved Black man who had gained his freedom and had become a respected member of the community. The gravestone is believed to be the oldest surviving marker of a free Black person in the United States.
“It’s amazing,” says Thomas (GRS’99). “I would say, in my 26 years, it is the most incredible discovery that I have come across.”
As the initiative’s sole staff member, Thomas oversees the preservation of the city’s 16 historic burying grounds dating from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Altogether, they contain more than 12,000 grave markers, tombs, and monuments honoring Boston’s earliest residents, including signers of the Declaration of Independence, a Salem witch trial judge, and the woman who inspired Mother Goose, the fictional author of nursery rhymes and fairy tales.
For more than two decades, Thomas has crouched over these grave markers, studying the names etched in stone, assessing any damage, and coordinating repairs to vaults requiring structural work, iron fences that have rusted, and paths that need new bricks.
Most of the markers she works with are made of slate, a stone favored for its durability in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, these old stones are susceptible to New England’s freeze-thaw cycles, pollution, and vandalism. Centuries of inclement weather had significantly damaged Boston’s gravestone.
But the marker stumped Thomas. It wasn’t included in a late 20th-century survey of the Granary Burying Ground, so she had to do some additional sleuthing.
The single name signaled to Thomas that the deceased was likely an enslaved person. Her research connected the gravestone to a man named Sebastian, whose life was chronicled in the 2024 book Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England by Gloria McCahon Whiting, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin. Thomas surmised that over time, Sebastian became known as Bastian and ultimately, Boston.
Whiting’s research describes Boston as a man who, while enslaved, formed friendships and relationships with “white allies in his years-long campaign to obtain a legal marriage to his wife, who was also enslaved,” she wrote in a statement. Evidence suggests his advocacy helped inspire New England’s earliest antislavery tract and legislation in Massachusetts supporting marriage rights for enslaved people.
Boston’s obituary appeared in the New England Weekly Journal, which reported that 150 people attended his funeral and that he was a respected member of the community. The notice was highly unusual, according to Thomas. At the time, most deaths received a short announcement, if that.
“If the governor died, then they’d have an article about it, and there might be a cannon salute or something like that,” she says. “But the fact that there was a paragraph about the guy, and [it says] that 150 people attended his funeral?”
She adds, “It’s always exciting when you find primary resources on somebody, because the records are so sparse. And for a person of color, there are even fewer records, so that was amazing.”
Thomas hired conservators from a local firm to carefully remove Boston’s marker and restore and clean it in their studio. The treatment made the inscription legible, and the marker was returned to the Granary Burying Ground.
“It makes me happy that such a great guy has a headstone, and his memory will live now,” Thomas says.
The Importance of Recovering Old Stories
Thomas grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., and worked in Europe after college. Surrounded by historic stone buildings, she became captivated by their history and architecture. She enrolled in BU’s graduate program in Preservation Studies, earning a master’s degree. After graduation, she helped her adviser, Keith Morgan, a College of Arts & Sciences professor emeritus of American and European architecture, photograph and organize images of historic Boston-area buildings for a book he was writing.
She soon landed a job with the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, which oversees the Historic Burying Grounds Initiative. She has been responsible for the program ever since, coordinating conservation projects, hiring contractors, reviewing plans, researching historical records, and fielding calls from people around the world who are trying to find their ancestors’ graves. The work is divided between the field and her desk, depending on the season.
Now, Thomas is starting work on a major project at the Dorchester North Burying Ground, established in 1633, a site with about 1,200 grave markers. The work will also include restoring the site’s large Neo-Egyptian-style gate.
For Thomas, preservation means more than keeping the old stones clean and upright. It’s an opportunity to ask new questions about the past and to recover the human stories of Bostonians—including people of color and Native Americans—that have been lost to time.
“I come across cool stories all the time,” Thomas says.