Kitchen Cemetery, Revisited
Saturday, December 5, 2009
By Marfy Goodspeed
Some time ago, I wrote an article on the Kitchen Family Burying Ground. It was published without pictures because I had been unable to visit the site. Well, that omission has been remedied. Recently I made that long-delayed visit and got some wonderful photos. Because it is important to put the photos with the names, I've decided to republish the article, with slight changes and photos attached.

The cemetery is located near Routes 523 and 579, back from the roads, hiding in the woods. In 1931, Egbert T. Bush wrote that half of the cemetery was located on the Thatcher farm and half on a farm owned by A. J. Dalrymple. Bush identified a few of the stones, and on a prior visit in 1995 I found a few more, for a total of 18 gravestones with initials.

I have taken the liberty of naming this cemetery the Kitchen Family cemetery, even though no stone has been found there with the name Kitchen. In fact, none of the stones have a name spelled out; they are all labeled with initials. Six of the eighteen stones that have been found show the initial K. Another six end with T., probably for the Thatcher family, although some could belong to the Trout family, who also owned land nearby. It is surprisingly difficult to match initials on gravestones with known residents of Delaware Township in the 18th century. It serves as a reminder that, because of poor record keeping, we know very little about the families of that time period.

You will sometimes read of people being buried "in Sand Brook," yet their graves cannot be found in the cemetery located next to the Sand Brook church. It seems that 100 years ago or more, people considered the Kitchen cemetery as part of Sand Brook. And there is another cemetery just south of the village, known as the Rake Family Cemetery which also is claimed as being "at Sand Brook." Both the Kitchen and the Rake Family Cemeteries predate the cemetery next to the church.

The Kitchen cemetery has a stone wall surrounding it (now much deteriorated), and just beyond the wall were several gravestones without markings. All Credit is due to Marfy Goodspeed