April 19, 1775: The Shot Heard Round the World
About Me and This Site
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Who am I?  Why did I do this?

My name is Eric Thomsen and I was a graduate student in the museum studies program at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Although I am originally from California, my interest in the Revolutionary War was one of the reasons why I decided to cross the country to continue my education in the Boston Area. My involvement with Find a Grave began soon after the site was founded in 1995, when I submitted the photos I had taken of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's grave in Oslo two years before. In the years that followed, I have submitted photos of the graves of both the famous and my family. Great heaps of thanks I give to Jim Tipton and crew at Find a Grave for creating and maintaining this free website. It is well worth a visit.

The idea for the website began on Patriots' Day, 2003, as I marched from Concord to Lexington along the Battle Road Trail. Along the Trail are eight graves of British soldiers, some holding more than one body. Having brought my camera to photograph the festivities in Concord, I photographed these graves, as well as that of the seven Lexington men killed on that town's Battle Green (the first to fall that morning, along with Asahel Porter of Woburn). After that, I began to wonder where the other British and Americans who were killed that first Patriots' Day were buried. With the great help of various area librarians, historical society members and others, I was able to locate and photograph the graves or memorial sites of the fifty Americans killed or mortally wounded. Unfortunately, because no one knows the names of the British soldiers killed or how many were buried in each of the graves that contain more than one body, I'll never know if I've found and photographed all of them.

As far as I knew, before I compiled this list, no exhaustive list of the burial or memorial sites of the Americans killed existed. (I have since learned that this is nearly not the case. Patricia Law Hatcher's 1988 Abstract of Graves of Revolutionary Patriots, based on the records of the D.A.R., is quite thorough. However, I say "nearly not the case" because the nine Americans for whom I have no burial sites are not listed in this four volume work.) Therefore, I submitted the photos I had taken to Find a Grave along with biographical information I had researched. To augment this, I created this website to help researchers and other interested persons find this information in a single place. I hope you find this site useful. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please email me.  You'll need to remove the word "REMOVE" from the address and please include "19 APRIL 1775" in the subject line in all caps so that I can pick it out from all the spam.