I suppose there will be all sorts of articles about the Booth family online and elsewhere throughout the week. So, I should not have been surprised when I came across this piece about Edwin in yesterday’s Boston Globe. It’s about he and his brothers’  ties to The Hub. As nineteenth century actors the Booths were nomads. It is not surprising they had ties to many locales. The accompanying photos include a picture of John F. Fitzgerald, John F. Kennedy’s grandfather, paying his respects at Booth’s grave. I had an idea for an interpretive program for the TRB to be held in Union Square on the anniversary of the Lincoln funeral procession passing the Roosevelt household on 14th Street. For unfortunate reasons outside of my control that did not come to pass.

We really were fortunate to visit his Gramercy Park home last week on the anniversary of Appomattox. We were speculating that night where Edwin was buried, and guessed it was either in New York or Baltimore. I knew it was not Green-Wood Cemetery because, well, that’s something I would have known. As it turns out, he rests today on Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. Crazily, at the exact moment of his 1893 funeral a terrible accident at Ford’s Theater in Washington killed several people. It was something straight out of a Shakespearean tragedy.

(image/By Midnightdreary (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)