Lot Title

Location in Cemetery

Section: a     Lot: --     Grave: --

Date of death

May-15-1862

Date of birth

Mar-3-1818

Age

Verse (Legibility: G - GOOD)

Unspecified

Veteran Information

No War Periods Served

Veteran: No

Relatives

Father of Mary Ann Ashbrook and two infants buried next to him

Stone Shape

Stone Decoration

Stone Condition

Stone Material

State of Stone

Other Information

Stone cleaned in 2021 and repaired in 2022 Thomas Ashbrook was born in England on March 3, 1818. His bride, Anna Maria Wordell (1828-1885), was born in Fall River, and lived in Westport. The two small marble stones that were found near Thomas’ gravestone marked the graves of the couple’s two infant children, who were buried here in the early 1850s. Thomas and Anna had a daughter who lived into adulthood. Mary A. Ashbrook was born on September 29, 1854. The family lived on Ray Street in New Bedford, which is now part of Acushnet Avenue, near the waterfront. Thomas worked in the whaling industry as a ship rigger. The rigger was a key figure in the group of tradesmen who prepared a ship for the sea. All of the lines and ropes on a vessel, for supporting the masts or for raising the sails, were installed by the rigger. On May 15, 1862, 44-year-old Thomas Ashbrook was working on the Hiawatha, a 382-ton ship which had recently returned from a lengthy whaling voyage in the Pacific Ocean. The Hiawatha was a three-masted, square-rigged vessel, each with topmast and topgallant mast. The ship was at the wharf of G. & M. Howland in New Bedford at the time. At approximately 5 o’clock, Thomas fell from the main topmast to the deck, a distance of about 45 feet, landing on his back and died of internal hemorrhaging two hours after the fall. Ann buried her husband alongside their infant children in her family’s burial ground in Westport. Ann remarried three and a-half years later, on December 12, 1865. At age 37, she became the second wife of Nathaniel Booth, a 46-year-old widowed gas pipe worker from New Bedford. Research: T. Baptista

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