PLEASE NOTE: THESE ARE NOT OFFICIAL RECORDS
THEY ARE INSCRIPTIONS OF LEGIBLE TOMBSTONES
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Monongahela Cemetery does not have section markers. The landmark for Saints Peter and Paul Section A is the chapel indicated in blue on the Monongahela Cemetery Map.
The Monongahela Cemetery spreads out across a hilltop a mile north of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Its lower ranges are dominated by Irish names, burials that date from the late nineteenth century. Near the lower gate is the Victorian mausoleum of Captain Bill Jones, Andrew Carnegie's first steelmaster, killed in a furnace accident in 1889. The lower ranges are orderly and well landscaped
By contrast, near the top, on the cemetery's steepest slope, is a dense cluster of Slovak burials from the first decades of the twentieth century. The memorials are small and often homemade--concrete or wooden steel-bar markers that erosion has tilted at crazy angles. Here a recurring icon is the triple cross of the Eastern-rite churches. These are the graves of immigrant steelworkers and their families, a visual record of the first generation's struggle to find a place in America.
About midpoint on the hillside, in a still Slovak but more prosperous-looking section stands a Greek Catholic chapel. Near it is a stone that says unelaborately, "Michael Belejcak, 1875 - 1914, Father."
Thomas Bell's description in Out of This Furnace is calculated and exact:Mike's lodge paid a five-hundred-dollar death benefit, all of which went for funeral expenses, masses for the dead and a four-grave plot excellently situated (near the chapel) in a newly opened section of the cemetery. The gravestone [Mary] chose was a granite column surmounted by the triple cross of the Greek Catholic Church. On it was carved: MICHAEL L. DOBREJCAK. Born December 8 1875, died March 7 1914.
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Thomas Bell (christened Adalbert Thomas) was born in Braddock on March 7, 1903, the son of Michael and Mary Belejcak. His deliberate choice of his father's gravesite for that of his fictional character Mike Dobrejcak is only one of many instances in which he borrowed from his family background to create Out of This Furnace.
-- Afterword of "Out of This Furnace" by Thomas Bell
Copyright � 2000-2007 Tom and Nancy McAdams
July 4, 2000
Last update October 3, 2007