After 215 years, member of St. John’s Church to be buried

The Rev. Amy D. Welin, top/second from left, Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Waterbury, Connecticut, leads a prayer, as she and other clergy lay their hands on the casket at a funeral service for an 18th-century slave called Fortune during a burial service on Thursday, September 12, 2013. (Cloe Poisson/Hartford Courant/MCT via Getty Images)

The Rev. Amy Welin started as the newly called priest-in-charge of St. John’s, Waterbury, in September 2012. A few months after that, Amy recalled in a phone interview, she received a call from the recently retired director of the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Marie Galbraith, asking Amy if she would be willing to bury a man named “Fortune” who had died in 1798.