Just this past Autumn my brother Ed and I went to Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery in search of a grave site. We found the cemetery to be extraordinarily beautiful, especially at that time of the year. We knew from other sources that Civil War veteran Jeremiah Sullivan was interred there and I was interested in writing a piece about him for DD214Chronicle, a newspaper serving veterans of northeast Ohio . Jeremiah had been President of Cleveland’s National City Bank and was an Ohio State Senator, amongst other offices he filled. In the cemetery’s on-line database he was not listed.
At the cemetery we found Memorial Adviser Mr. Russ Smith to be helpful and discovered he was listed as Colonel Jeremiah Sullivan. In fact, they did not know he was a Civil War Veteran, a Sergeant in the Third Ohio Field Artillery (Colonel it turned out was an office he held in a post-war veterans’ organization). Mr. Smith took us on their golf car to the gravesite. We discovered the plot was quite large with many of Jeremiah’s immediate family buried there as well. Mr. Smith advised that there were five empty gravesites there but we would have to prove we were related to the Colonel if we wanted to claim any of them. We informed him that was not our purpose for being there, although it may very well turn out to be just the case.
Researching matters further we discovered his older brother John, who we had not known about, was in the same Civil War unit as was Jeremiah, the Third Ohio Field Artillery. Captain John was buried in the Catholic Cemetery of St. Philip & James, Canal Fulton, Ohio. After participating in the campaigns of Vicksburg, with General Grant, Atlanta with General Sherman and Nashville, Jeremiah mustered out as a Sergeant in Cleveland on July 31, 1865. Finding out this additional information meant a road trip with brother Ed to Canal Fulton.
While trapesing about in the old section of the Canal Fulton cemetery for a while we had no luck finding what we believed would be the family gravesites. I sat down to rest while my younger brother Ed continued to look. There, staring me in the face was Captain John Sullivan’s grave marker. And behind it were the graves of their mother and father. From that visit we discovered Jeremiah’s father, also named Jeremiah, and mother’s burial site, right behind Captain John’s. They entire family had been born in Ireland, the father in Dromagh, Co. Cork in 1807 and the mother, Mary Moylan in Cork, 1810. Many other family members were there but that’s another story.
Brother Ed at the senior Jeremiah J. Sullivan’s final resting place.
