My heart is heavy as I write this because Vinny Loggia passed away this month, March of 2026. Our friendship was an improbable thing. He was from Bayside, Queens, New York, and I am a denizen of the South Carolina Lowcountry. However, sometimes life’s paths are destined to cross, forging mighty bonds.
A shared family legacy brought Vinny and me into each other’s life orbit, and we always had a chuckle when I called him “my cousin Vinny.” Cousin was a total stretch because our respective family trees converged back in 1788 when a certain Ann Thorne married a dude named William Wilkins, and there’s a backstory as old as the early days of American colonial history.
The saga begins in 1637 when William Thorne landed from England at the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He became embroiled in a religious squabble and fled to what is now Flushing, New York, to avoid the possibility of losing some essential body parts if convicted of religious heresy. The New England Puritans had no sense of humor, let alone tolerance for dissenters.
Twenty years later, in 1657, William and his son, William Jr., were signers of the Flushing Remonstrance, often referred to as a precursor to the Bill of Rights. Of note, William Jr. was illiterate, and he signed with an ‘X’ attested by another signer.
The remonstrance declared opposition to the Dutch governor of the New Netherland Colony (Manhattan today), Peter Stuyvesant, who sought to impose the Dutch Reform religion on the people of Flushing, mostly Quakers. The religious brouhaha eventually settled down, likely because the good Mister Stuyvesant was simply sick and tired of fussing with a bunch of unruly Quakers.
Around 1645, William Sr. bought a hundred and fifty-four acres near Flushing on a bluff overlooking an inlet from the Atlantic Ocean. William was the first of six Thorne generations to farm the land, and the area was known as Thorne’s Neck. On the original survey of the Thorne farm, there was a clearly marked and designated portion of the land reserved for a cemetery. The original William and members of five subsequent Thorne generations were buried in that cemetery. After the 1788 marriage of Ann Thorne to William Wilkins, the burial ground also served as the final resting place of the Wilkins family, and the graveyard became known as the Thorne-Wilkins Cemetery.
The four children of Ann and William inherited the property and eventually sold it to Charles Willets in 1829. The property was then known as Willets Point, and it changed hands a few times until the U.S. Army acquired it in 1858 to become Fort Totten. It remains Fort Totten today.
Fortuitously, every deed of conveyance included the burial ground in its survey. To the Army’s credit, despite all the gravestones having succumbed to the ravages of time, they marked the graveyard with cornerstones that still exist today…although the markers are barely visible and probably do more to damage lawn mower blades than mark a graveyard. The site has one memorial stone for Charles Willets still in place, even though Willets is no longer buried there. His body was removed and re-interred elsewhere in 1855.
So, what does all this have to do with “my cousin Vinny,” and how did he and I become so dearly connected?
It all started a couple of decades ago, when Vinny and his brother, Tom, wanted to visit the graves of their Thorne/Wilkins ancestors. New York has a law that allows descendants of isolated burial grounds to enter property for visitation. At first, the Army denied Vinny and Tom access to Fort Totten because the two brothers a.) had no credentials for base access; and b.) couldn’t prove they were Thorne/Wilkins descendants.
Well, you can imagine what happened next. With the fervor of hungry dogs digging for bones, Tom and Vinny set about tracing their lineage. Vinny, who by his own admission had a learning disability, led the charge and compiled a massive binder of data filled with histories, maps, surveys, deeds, family data, you name it. It was a masterful piece of work, worthy of a PhD dissertation…so much for learning disabilities. Thus, armed with their research, all of it validated by a famous, for real PhD archeologist, the base authorities had no choice but to grant Tom and Vinny access to our family graveyard.
Along the way, Vinny searched for some Thornes to help out, and he found me. We immediately hit it off with a shared sense of humor and unity of purpose. We reached a consensus to place a memorial monument on the burial ground to commemorate the land’s history and our collective heritage. But it would not be so easy.
The burial ground lies on a lawn directly in front of the base headquarters building. After making a few discrete inquiries, it was clear the red tape required to get approval for a monument would surely have devolved into a struggle of passion versus ponderous paperwork and bureaucracy. So, in the full spirit of ‘it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission,’ we came up with a plan.
Over a weekend, we would plunk a large rock on the site, let it sit there for a bit, then affix a bronze commemorative plaque with information about the burial ground. There was a prankish aspect to the escapade, and we figured if the rock was big enough, nobody would spend the energy to remove it.
It worked. The rock mysteriously appeared on the expansive lawn, and the plaque appeared shortly thereafter.
With the monument in place, we all had a great sense of accomplishment. Vinny, Tom, me, and my wife Leslie kept in touch over the subsequent years, and we have developed a deep and abiding sense of kinship. Sadly, it was Tom who reached out to give us the devastating news of Vinny’s passing. It hit us hard. We had lost a loved one.
And so, a son of the Lowcountry mourns the passing of a man from Bayside, Queens. It is fitting that Vinny’s name adorns the rock as one of the four sponsoring donors. The rock has been anchoring the old family graveyard since 2018. While nothing is forever, for many years it will proclaim the pride and affection shared by a united American family…and if God needs help with a research project, a newly arrived angel is the man for the job.
