In death, Jane Holmes resides in Allegheny Cemetery much as she did in life, in the semi-circle of her family, gathered not around a hearth but a shrouded urn raised high on a granite column.

Not far away, on another hillside in the same cemetery, lies another Jane Holmes, this one at the end of a row of granite sarcophagi under which she, her parents and siblings are buried.

The two Janes were first cousins in 19th-century Pittsburgh, women who shared a name and a passion for giving away family money. Collectively, the Misses Jane Holmes donated at least $1.5 million -- equivalent to about $43 million in today's dollars -- to agencies that served the poor, aged and sick. They founded, or were present at the creation of, at least a dozen charitable institutions, including Children's Hospital, the Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children and UPMC Shadyside.

The Holmes women never married or worked outside the home; the money they gave away was earned by their fathers and brothers as merchants and bankers, men who shared their commitment to improving the lives of Pittsburghers in need at a time when government often did not.

But while one Jane, born in Ireland in 1805, is remembered in a historical marker in front of the Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children and an internship there, the other, born in Baltimore in 1814, is mostly forgotten.

To distinguish between the Janes when referring to them, mutual friends called them "Pittsburgh Jane" and "Baltimore Jane." But after their deaths and as the decades passed, the two Janes often were conflated into a single person. Clues, sometimes misleading ones, to who did what long lay buried in forgotten books.

But today, with the digital Historic Pittsburgh Web site as a resource, it's possible to untangle the Misses Jane Holmes and their good works -- and uncover something of their family, homes and bustling, diverse Downtown neighborhood, where not a trace remains of the lives they lived.

"What a friendly neighborhood it was," Agnes Hays Gormly wrote in her 1922 memoir of Old Penn Street just before and during the Civil War, in which her father, Gen. Alexander Hays, had died. As a child, she lived with her grandparents in the same block as Pittsburgh Jane, who lived on Penn near Hay (now Stanwix) Street, on the spot where retailer Joseph Horne, whose daughter Susan married another Holmes cousin, would build a department store. Baltimore Jane lived just a few houses away, also on Penn but in the next block, closer to the Point, and on the opposite side of the street.

Pittsburgh Jane, her older brother William and their parents, David and Eleanor Kells Holmes, left County Antrim, Ireland, for the village of Pittsburgh in 1807. Thomas Jefferson was president and Meriwether Lewis had pushed off on his Western adventure from one of the town's riverbanks just four years earlier, when Pittsburgh had about 400 houses. Most of the streets were unpaved, hogs and dogs ran loose and on days without wind, a black cloud of smoke from ever-present coal fires hung in the air.

The arrival date of David's brother James -- Baltimore Jane's father -- is unknown, but a third Holmes brother, Nathaniel (who also had a daughter named Jane), also immigrated in 1807 and by 1826 was established as a broker and porter (liquor) merchant on Market Street. The bank he'd founded in 1822 -- N. Holmes & Sons -- financed "many an early Pittsburgh steel mill," wrote the Pittsburgh Bulletin Index in 1935, and in time occupied a one-story, temple-front Greek Revival building at the corner of Fourth and Market.

The Bulletin Index story reports Nathaniel also was partner in a cotton mill with Thomas Arbuckle, father of coffee king John Arbuckle. The Holmes name "was interwoven with Pittsburgh's business interests and there were few lines in which it was not represented," wrote George Fleming in his 1922 "History of Pittsburgh."

Pittsburgh Jane's parents had at least five children: William, Jane, John, Mary and David. Their father, David, was a grocer whose shop in 1826 was on Liberty near Market. By 1872, the family's W. Holmes & Co. grocery store was at the corner of First and Market, "where the selection of coffee, tea and rice was most seriously attended to and where sometimes Mr. John Holmes [Jane's brother] would come out of the glass coop in which he sat, to speak to grandma of some extra fine New Orleans molasses or the like," Mrs. Gormly wrote.

In January 1807, a James Holmes advertised in the Pittsburgh Gazette that at the corner of Water and Ferry streets, overlooking the Monongahela wharf, he carried "an assortment of groceries, wines, spirituous liquors, & bottled porter, all of superior and approved quality," and that "merchants and traders descending the river will be accommodated with boat-stores of the best quality put up in the shortest notice and at a moderate price." He may have been Baltimore Jane's father; a warehouse on Water Street was part of her estate at the time of her death. In any case, his notice shows how the Holmes family could have made a great deal of money when Pittsburgh was the gateway to the West.

Baltimore Jane, who seems to have moved to Pittsburgh as a young woman, also had a brother named William, of W.B. Holmes & Brother, a pork and beef packing company adjacent to their cousins' store. In 1833, he was a founder in and later president of Merchants and Mechanics Bank. The unmarried siblings shared the family home on Penn until William's death in 1881.

Pittsburgh Jane and her siblings William, John and Mary remained single and also lived in their family home on Penn, sharing a duplex with their Uncle Nathaniel's son, also named Nathaniel, and his wife Susan Horne and their children. Both houses, Mrs. Miller recalled, were three-story dwellings with high steps, on lots that ran to Duquesne Way (now Fort Duquesne Boulevard) on which their "spic and span stables" stood facing the Allegheny River.

Pittsburgh Jane "spent her life visiting and caring for the poor and the sick," Mrs. Miller writes, and Jane's brother William "was one of the most generous donors the town ever knew ... Together they planned where their gifts should be bestowed."

Pittsburgh Jane "had her daily round of calls from her 'poor friends.' Along in 1880 a young girl, who was dying of consumption without friends or place of shelter, appealed to her for aid," wrote John Newton Boucher in his 1908 history of Pittsburgh. "She found a friend in Miss Holmes, who from the day she took her to care for, began to dream of a haven of rest for the last days of her brothers and sisters struck with incurable maladies." In 1833, she converted her family's country home on 16 acres in Lawrenceville into the Protestant Home for Incurables. The site, at Butler and 56th streets, now holds a shopping center, but its large sycamores survive.

Pittsburgh Jane and Baltimore Jane often worked together on charitable projects, sometimes under the umbrella of the Christian Women's Association.

When Baltimore Jane in 1871 saw the need for a home for aged women, she and her cousin raised the money to build one in Wilkinsburg. In 1984, the name of the Home for Aged Protestant Women at Swissvale Avenue and Rebecca Street was changed to Rebecca Residence, which moved to West Deer in 1999.

In 1881, Pittsburgh Jane founded the Home for Aged Protestant Men and Couples next door to the women's home; its name eventually was changed to the Jane Holmes Residence and Gardens. It closed last fall.

The cousins joined with Mrs. Felix Brunot to underwrite the founding of the Home for Colored Children in 1880; it lives on as Three Rivers Youth in Brighton Heights.

In her will, Pittsburgh Jane, who died in 1885, established several institutions, including the School for Blind Children, where her portrait hangs in the conference room. In 2004, seven agencies including the school established the Jane Holmes Legacy Council, which lobbied for a historical marker, installed last year, and created an internship, supported by a grant from the Buhl Foundation, at four of the institutions in her name. And the YWCA gave Pittsburgh Jane a posthumous Leadership Award in 2006.

Near the end of her life, Baltimore Jane moved to a large home, now demolished, on Sherman Avenue in Allegheny City. Her funeral was held there in 1893.

The homes for the aged and charities aiding "the freedmen" were her life's work, an obituary in the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reports, and she was "beloved of all" for her good works and her character. "Night and day she worked at lint-making during the war, and sufferers from the Johnstown flood owed much to her assistance."

The Holmes women wore their wealth lightly and spent their fortunes in ways that benefited generations of Pittsburghers. In a city where the names Carnegie and Frick, Mellon and Phipps still echo on the landscape, these humble women deserve, both of them, to be better remembered.