The Simplest Markers

In a cemetery filled with grand monuments and exceptional funerary art, one still finds simple markers like this little homemade cross on the North Ridge.  A piece of paper (perhaps from a religious booklet) pasted on it has long since weathered away, but a rosary is still looped around it.  Census and burial records identify this as the grave of Walter Burchalewski.  Born in Poland in 1877, he immigrated to the United States in 1899.  By 1930, he was living in Albany with his wife, Josefa, and eight children.  He died in 1959.