Grave Number 2095

 

In 1948 Jimmie Skinner wrote the song Doin’ my Time.

The version I remember from the 1950s went

Doin’ my time

With a ball and chain;

They call you by your number

Not your name.

Someone to whom this ultimately applied was Albert Delmont Jones aka Albert Royal Delmont. His life story has been covered on this blog in the past (for example see - https://jeromehistory.blogspot.com/2019/11/1-introduction-to-albert-delmont-jones.html) with his work with Charles Taze Russell, his magazines, his marriages, his fraudulant schemes, and ultimately his death alone and in obscurity.

But a little more original source material has to come to light. Hence, Albert’s number. When he died his grave marker had no name – just his number, 2095.

Rewinding slightly – Albert disappears from the 1920 census, although if any other researcher can find him there please do so and enlighten us. Down on his luck with his heady days long behind him he turns up in the 1925 census for Buffalo, New York. A slight malfunction of a pen probably turned an entry for Albert R Delmont into Albert K Delmont, but the age is right.

Albert is living with more than 25 other men as a roomer in three linked dwellings. The head of the family, one Geo Van Nese, calls himself a "hotel proprietor." This appears to be a hostel for single men. Albert, who owns up to being 70 years old, is retired.

At the beginning of February 1929 Albert moved into the New Castle Hospital in Delaware. We know this from his death certificate which is now available on Find a Grave. He died there on May 15, 1930 and the death certificate said he had been there for 1 year, 3 months and 12 days. He had been attended there by a doctor since the end of February 1929 for Chronic Diabetes. Insulin injections transformed the treatment of diabetes in the 1920s and Albert was quite fortunate to live as long as he did, especially after what we might assume as to his lifestyle.

No family details are given on the certificate. Albert was survived by several ex-wives (by my reckoning four) and three adult children. But no-one knew where he was. And no-one cared.

New Castle County Hospital started life as the New Castle County Almshouse in 1885.  It was designed to house people who were generally single, elderly or infirm, and crucially – poor. It was an effort of the state to care for people who had no family to help them, a bit akin to the British workhouse.

A postcard exists showing the building.

The caption reads: New Castle County Hospital and Delaware State Hospital for Insane. Near Wilmington, Del.

The building housing Albert was the one on the left. Why anyone would choose to send such a miserable postcard to anyone else is open to question.

If you lived there, then you died there, and were usually buried in a nearby pauper’s cemetery generally called New Castle County Cemetery in the Woods at Farnworth.

Here is where the numbering system came in. Each grave had a small stone marker about 5 inches square. Each stone had a number. If it had been a bad week for deaths, then once a grave was dug it could have multiple occupants.

The hospital closed down in 1933. The building was eventually destroyed by fire, and it was thought that all records had been lost. However, in recent years the Death Book for 1926–1933 was rediscovered and painstakingly recorded in a database by Professor Kathy Dettwyler of Delaware University. The original register gives us the entry for Albert. Below, courtesy of the Delaware Records Office is his entry. It goes right across a double page.

The right hand page reads:

That this is the right Albert is made clear from the census held earlier in 1930 where Albert was still sufficiently lucid to give his place of birth.

Albert’s stone is not visible today. In the early 1960s the bulk of the cemetery was just covered over to make a ramp for an approach road to the Delaware Memorial Bridge. No records were then extant for those buried there and there was scant concern for the graveyard. Below is a modern photograph showing part of the site where a few stones can still be seen, but the numbers in the photograph show these are quite early ones. Albert is definitely buried under the bulk of the site that disappeared in the 1960s.

Photograph by Hal G. Brown.

There is one quirk of fate to complete this tale. After editing a religious paper in the 1880s, Albert tried his hand again with a political journal in 1900. It was called American Progress.

I make no attempt to understand American politics of this era, and Albert no doubt was a product of his times. However, a clear tenet of his paper was that Negroes should be banned from government.

Careful work by Kathy Dettwyler sifted through all the entries in the New Castle Death Book to reveal that Albert was not alone in grave number 2095. You can now check out the details on Find a Grave.

Here is Albert’s entry.

 But in the same grave, plot number 2095, there is also a child.

No gender is given, and Baby Crompton is stillborn. But the original entry for grave 2095 shows that Baby Crompton, forever sharing Albert’s final resting place under the freeway, is BLACK.

There is a certain irony there.