Backyard gravestone discovery
Woman connects with Annie Barton’s family through social media
A 60-year-old gravestone was not the discovery Julie Densham expected to make while digging up her garden to plant vegetables, but the recent find didn’t spook the Crown Point resident.
While working to prepare a small plot in the backyard of her home near Newlands Avenue and Kenilworth Avenue North on Monday afternoon, her shovel hit what appeared to be a large patio stone.
After some heavy lifting to flip the object over, Densham spotted the word “Mother” engraved on a headstone, along with the name Annie Barton and the years “1866-1958.”
“I’ve been gardening for many years so I’ve dug up many interesting things, so it didn’t surprise me that it was happening, but also I like creepy things so I was really excited,” the Hamilton resident said about her find.
Densham took to social media Monday afternoon, trying to track down the history behind the 92-year-old woman’s gravestone.
Later that night, she had her story.
Had the information not come to light, “I was coming out there at midnight with my Ouija board and my camera set up,” Densham said with a laugh.
It turns out the stone belonged to the great-great-grandmother of Jim Boyko, whose family bought Densham’s current home in the late 1960s.
When his grandmother died in 1980, the family replaced the old gravestone with a new one that had both women’s names etched on it because they were buried together in Woodland Cemetery.
The now 53-year-old was 15 at the time and remembers his dad coming home and placing the old stone face down in front of a shed in the yard, but he doesn’t recall ever seeing the other side of it.
“I pretty much grew up with that there,” he said.
When Boyko bought the house from his parents, he tore the old shed down, built a new one and put the metal shed in the corner of the yard.
He placed the marker in front of the metal shed — an area of the yard that often got muddy.
“Where can you get a nice granite stone like that for nothing?” he joked.
Boyko sold the house in 2010, and having moved in the middle of winter, he forgot that the stone was there until the story started making the rounds on social media Monday.
Kara Bunn, the city’s manager of parks and cemeteries, said staff started searching the name after learning a marker had been found in someone’s garden.
Their first thought was it must be a duplicate, she said, noting it’s quite common for people to switch out a stone because they want one that’s larger or has more names on it.
Sure enough, they found a plot for Annie Barton in Woodland Cemetery, and the marker had two names on it.
Densham and Boyko have now been in contact.
Boyko is deciding whether he’ll pick up the stone or leave it with Densham.
If he brings it up the Mountain to his new home, his wife joked that “They’re going to see Annie Barton moving all around the city still.”
If Densham ends up with the original stone, she said it will remain in her garden “as a reminder of this little mystery adventure and that life is so short.”
“Although not for Annie,” she quipped.