In the fall of 2008 I attended the Mayflower Congress in Plymouth, Massachusetts. We signed up for a tour of the area called "In the Footsteps of the Pilgrims." I took this photo at the Hingham, Massachusetts Cemetery behind the Old Ship Church. It is a memorial sculpture on the Maria Hooper grave, and is known locally as the “Angel of Grief.”
When I went to Google to look up “Angel of Grief” I found that the Hooper monument is a copy of an 1894 sculpture by William Wetmore Story, over his own grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. He originally named it “The Angel of Grief Weeping at the Dismantled Altar of Life.” It was a very popular Victorian memorial, and was copied in a style known as the “Weeping Angel.” At Wikipedia there is a listing of at least twelve replicas in the United States, including three in Texas.
A map of the Hingham Cemetery (#17 is the Angel of Grief”) http://www.hinghamcemetery.org/HinghamCemeteryMap.pdf
Wikipedia story of the Angel of Grief http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_of_Grief
Our Weeping Angel Foundation http://www.ourweepingangel.org by John Hooper Dean, great great grandson of Maria Hooper of Hingham. Click on “Why weeping angel” for a history of the sculpture.
UPDATE: A few days after this story posted online, I learned more about this statue from a reader! Click here for a second blog post: https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/01/unexpected-blog-story.html
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Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Tombstone Tuesday- Angel of Grief", Nutfield Genealogy, posted January 19, 2010, ( https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/01/tombstone-tuesday-angel-of-grief.html: accessed [access date]).
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