Shakespeare's father, who died in 1601, and his mother, Mary Arden, who died in 1608, were buried in or near this church. (The register says, under Burials, "September 9, 1608, Mayry Shaxspere, wydowe.") His infant sisters Joan, Margaret, and Anne, and his brother Richard, who died, aged thirty-nine, in 1613, may also have been laid to rest in this place. Of the death and burial of his brother Gilbert there is no record. His sister Joan, the second--Mrs. Hart--would naturally have been placed with her relatives. His brother Edmund, dying in 1607, aged twenty-seven, is under the pavement of St. Saviour's church in Southwark. The boy Hamnet, dying before his father had risen into local eminence, rests, probably, in an undistinguished grave in the churchyard. (The register records his burial on August 11, 1596.) The family of Shakespeare seems to have been short-lived and it was soon extinguished. He himself died at fifty-two. Judith's children perished young. Susanna bore but one child--Elizabeth--who became successively Mrs. Nashe and Lady Barnard, and she, dying in 1670, was buried at Abingdon, near Oxford. She left no children by either husband, and in her the race of Shakespeare became extinct. That of Anne Hathaway also has nearly disappeared, the last living descendant of the Hathaways being Mrs. Baker, the present occupant of Anne's cottage at Shottery. Thus, one by one, from the pleasant gardened town of Stratford, they went to take up their long abode in that old church, which was ancient even in their infancy, and which, watching through the centuries in its monastic solitude on the shore of Avon, has seen their lands and houses devastated by flood and fire, the places that knew them changed by the tooth of time, and almost all the associations of their lives obliterated by the improving hand of destruction.