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The game is afoot at St. Michael the Archangel Church.

Back in July, the South Glens Falls parish was preparing to install a patio around the church’s statue of their own St. Michael the Archangel. Pavers were working on installing the patio when they unearthed something entirely unexpected.

A 156-year-old grave marker from the late 1860s lay beneath the church. Half of the tombstone is broken off, giving only part of the information on the deceased. It reads: “Patrick — died May 25, 1863. Age: 4 years. Catharine — died Aug. 26, 1866.”

Now the parish staff is trying to find any current living family relatives of the deceased who might still be residing in the Glens Falls/South Glens Falls region.

Father Tony Childs, pastor of St. Michael the Archangel, hopes that finding a connection will reunite the children with their families and allow the stone to be placed in a proper burial spot with their relatives.

“The ultimate goal is that the stone needs to be put up somewhere in the cemetery,” said Father Childs. “We don’t want to not honor those souls, especially if they’re infants.”

Before St. Michael the Archangel Church was constructed in the 1950s, the land was used as a cemetery associated with St. Mary’s Church in Glens Falls, with graves dating as far back as the 1800s. In the 1880s, St. Mary’s decided to move the church — and the gravesite — to a larger space. Bodies and headstones were moved to the current St. Mary’s cemetery site on Main Street in Glens Falls, but no move is perfect. Gravestones with no bodies to match may have been left behind on the old site, which Father Childs predicts happened to the unearthed grave.

Julie Dowd, a staff member at the church and practiced genealogist, helped lead the search in an attempt to identify the two children. Right away, most leads were exhausted: St. Mary’s church and cemetery had no record of the deaths, and ancestry sites such as Find a Grave (www.findagrave.com) and FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org) had proven fruitless. Glens Falls city death records only go back to 1888 and newspaper searches were no help. 

In honor of All Souls Day — and hopeful for leads — Dowd put out a call for help on the parish’s Facebook page in November. Lisa Walsh Dougherty, a resident genealogist for the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany and volunteer at the Crandall Public Library’s Folklife Center in Glens Falls, was sent the posting by a friend.

“It’s a beautiful headstone but there’s no last name on it,” Dougherty said. “Not having a lot of information … intrigued me on how to get to the bottom of this.”

Dougherty started looking through old census records. Based on the information, she found a family with a son Patrick who was alive for the 1860 census but died before the state census in 1865. In that same census, the parents of the family — John and Mary Luby — had also added another child, a daughter named Catharine.

It’s a promising match, but Dougherty notes that without proper records there may not be a definitive way of proving its accuracy, which isn’t uncommon. “This sort of thing happens a lot with genealogy,” she said. “You get to a point where you can’t prove things without paperwork. The paperwork just doesn’t exist or you aren’t able to find it, so you have to just gather the evidence you can find, lay it all out and see what makes sense.”

One parishioner, and a local of the Glens Falls area, has come forward believing that her ancestry might have connections to the Luby family. If a plausible connection is found, she has agreed to place the gravestone on the family plot they own at St. Mary’s cemetery.

“There’s not going to be that much documentary evidence, so we just have to use what’s out there to make the call,” Dougherty added.

The hope is still that the stone can be placed with any family in a cemetery as a final resting spot.

“We would like, in some time, for it to be situated in such a way that it brings honor to the family it belongs to,” Father Childs said, “and it gets them reconnected once again.”

If you have any leads or information on helping identify Patrick and Catharine, reach out directly to the church by phone at (518) 792-5859, or by email at [email protected].

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