If you wander through the Mather Cemetery, you’ll find the headstone
for Betsey Mather Lockwood (1794-1891), the ninth of Deacon Joseph Mather and Sarah Scott’s eleven children.
Betsey, first married at twenty, was twice-widowed by the age of thirty-one.
Betsey had two daughters, one by each of her husbands. To the right of Betsey’s headstone is that of her second daughter, Ann Elizabeth Lockwood.
Integral to Homestead history, Ann Elizabeth, who never married, inherited the Homestead from her aunt Phebe and subsequently sold the property to Stephen Mather’s father, Joseph Wakeman Mather.
The headstone to the left of Betsey’s is that of Sarah Ann Bell Faulkner. Born in 1815 to Betsey and her first husband Jonathan Bell, Sarah married William Faulkner in 1849. According to the Federal census of 1850, William and Sarah Ann were living in Brooklyn along with Betsey and Ann Elizabeth. Little more than five years after her marriage, Sarah Ann died on 13 October 1854.
Sadly, to the left of Sarah Ann’s headstone is a single headstone for Sarah Ann and William’s two small girls, Mary L. Faulkner (October 1850-February 1854) and Sarah A. Faulkner (July 1853-March 1854.) Now at age sixty, Betsey had buried two husbands, a daughter, and her only two grandchildren.
Although we lack comprehensive death records for the mid-nineteenth century, 1854 is remembered as the year of cholera, claiming more than 2,000 lives in New York City.
Ultimately, the causes of death are inconsequential. Perhaps of greater solace is that in a peaceful, sunlit space in Darien, these five lives are together remembered and united.
