I walked in the burying-yard, and viewed the granite tombestones erected over the graves of my ancestors ... four generations, of whom very little more is known than is recorded upon these stones. There are three succeeding generations of us now living. Pass another century, and we shall all be mouldering in the same dust or resolved into the same elements. Who of our posterity shall then visit this yard? And what shall be read engraved upon the stone?

John Quincy Adams

September 20, 1823