Gravestone Stories: An Illustrated Collection of Alexandria Family Trees

Who lies beside whom, and why? This illustrated collection gathers sixty-nine family trees from Alexandria, Virginia’s historic burial grounds into one volume. It covers the Presbyterian, Christ Church Episcopal, St. Paul’s, Methodist Protestant and Trinity Methodist cemeteries of the Wilkes Street Cemetery Complex, Ivy Hill Cemetery, and the Old Town burial grounds of the Old Presbyterian Meeting House and Christ Church.

Each tree follows one family and shows where each person rests. Among them are one of the town’s founders and the woman elected Treasurer of Alexandria, Washington’s physician and the gunsmith who sold him a rifle, two men of the Boston Tea Party and the senior general of the Confederacy. There is a free Black family whose members freed one another, a firefighter lost in the King Street fire of 1855, and a family that lost three of its own in the Knickerbocker Theatre collapse of 1922.

The trees are drawn from original research: gravestones read in the field, church and burial records, newspapers, wills, census returns and the work of fellow researchers. Where the record is uncertain, the trees say so. Dashed lines mark relationships not yet proven, and notes explain where a gravestone and a document disagree.

This edition adds what a single tree can’t. It has a contents list and a guide to the families by burial ground. Its index of more than five hundred names lets you follow a person from one family into the next. A reader’s key explains how to read every tree. Every page number and contents entry is a link, and each tree links to its full story online. The trees can also be viewed one at a time on gravestonestories.com; this book brings them together, corrected and indexed, in a single volume.

Your purchase helps keep the research behind Gravestone Stories free to read online.

By David Heiby • Digital PDF edition • 87 pages • Published by Gravestone Stories, 2026