Today the Nerds are once again joined by historian and blogger Jess Bruce, who continues her fascinating investigation into one of Boston’s most famous and surprisingly complicated burial sites: the Hancock family tomb in the Granary Burying Ground. Jess has been hard at work untangling the documentary and physical evidence surrounding Tomb 16, and in her latest post, she tackles a deceptively simple question with major historical implications: just how many members of the Hancock family are actually buried there?
You can read her original and very detailed post at the link here.
To understand why this question matters, you first have to appreciate the setting.
Boston’s Granary Burying Ground, established in 1660, is one of the city’s most historically dense landscapes. Within its walls lie the remains of Revolutionary icons such as Samuel Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Paul Revere, and James Otis, along with thousands of ordinary Bostonians whose lives made the city what it is. Although only about 2,300 markers are visible today, many more people are buried beneath the ground and inside its tombs.
Tomb No. 16, commonly known as the Hancock family tomb, has long been identified as the final resting place of Governor John Hancock, a prominent first signer of the Declaration of Independence. While this association is accurate, the tomb was originally constructed as a family vault intended for use by multiple generations. The identities and interment dates of those buried within have been the subject of ongoing confusion, speculation, and historical inaccuracies.
In her new post, Jess does what good historians do: she goes back to the records.
Drawing on archival material and a detailed burial index compiled with the help of a FindAGrave contributor, she reconstructs a list of known and likely interments connected to the Hancock and Scott families. Based on surviving documentation, 15 coffins have been confirmed as placed in Tomb 16. Two additional individuals, Captain James Scott Jr. and Elizabeth Lowell Hancock, are very likely candidates as well, though the evidence for them is indirect. If they are included, the total rises to seventeen.
The list of those buried in the tomb reads like a compressed family history of the Hancocks. Alongside John Hancock himself are his brother, Ebenezer Hancock; his tragically young son, John George Washington Hancock; and a range of relatives stretching into the nineteenth century, including John Hancock II, Elizabeth Lowell Hancock Moriarty, and siblings such as Charles Lowell Hancock and George Hancock. What emerges is not merely a list of names but a multi-generational story of a prominent Boston family whose private lives unfolded alongside the public history of the new nation.
A particularly compelling piece of evidence presented by Jess is an 1883 sketch of the tomb’s interior, depicting 12 coffins stacked within the vault, with the smallest, believed to belong to Hancock’s young son, placed on top. This image serves as a powerful visual reminder that these tombs functioned not as abstract monuments but as tangible spaces, continually filled and revisited over time, shaped by grief, family custom, status, and reputation.
Jess’s work is particularly valuable because it demonstrates that even the most prominent figures in American history are subject to uncertainty, assumptions, and oversimplification. Upon closer examination, the Hancock tomb emerges as more than a tourist destination; it serves as a case study in familial remembrance, the preservation and loss of records, and the meticulous effort required to transform legend into history. For those interested in Revolutionary Boston, burial grounds, or the investigative process of historical research, Tomb 16 proves to be significantly more complex and populated than it initially appears.
