Old Gravesend Cemetery
This 1896 lantern slide might be the oldest known image of the Gravesend Cemetery. The view is looking northeast toward the Samuel Hubbard House (hidden behind the trees) at 2338 Gravesend (now McDonald) Avenue. {Collection of Joseph Ditta}
Old Gravesend Cemetery is a historic cemetery at Gravesend Neck Road and McDonald Avenue in Gravesend, Brooklyn, New York, New York. The cemetery was founded about 1658 and contains the graves of a number of the original patentees and their families. Lady Deborah Moody, founder of Gravesend, is believed to be buried in the cemetery. The cemetery is the oldest surviving burial ground in New York City. It remained in sporadic use as late as 1968. It was offically designated a New York City Landmark in 1976.
I visited the cemetery in February 2000, but found it padlocked. I tried contacting several municipal individuals to see if they could locate any records about my ancestors burials, but came up empty handed. In 2017, I contacted Joseph Ditta, the webmaster for gravesendgazette.com. He was gathering information about the cemetery and verified that the graves of my Kuntze and Leier ancestors have no markers. I can tell you with some certainty that the exact locations of the Kuntze and Leier graves is unknown; none of them have stones. There is a chart made of the cemetery in 1923 that includes every grave that had a stone; the Kuntze and Leier names do not appear on it.
On July 31, 1888, 10-month-old William Kuntze died and was buried at Gravesend Cemetery. Two days prior to his death, his mother Bertha (Nowasky) Kuntze gave birth to Albert Kuntze, Jr. Baby Albert died the same day. Although his death record says he was buried at Greenwood Cemetery, Greenwood has no record of it. Therefore, I'm inclined to believe that he is in Gravesend. Two more babies followed William and Albert: Emma Leier in 1891 and Annie Leier in 1896. In 1897, William and Albert's father, Albert Kuntze Sr., was buried in Gravesend.
