Midwest Cemeteries

As Drew and I traveled back home from Minneapolis this week, our route from Minnesota to Virginia included two of my "bucket list" cemeteries. It was moving experience to stand at the graves of the ancestors that I have come to know through my research.

Ada Crofford

The first cemetery we visited was "Mound Prairie Cemetery" in Twin Lakes, near Kenosha on the southeastern corner of Wisconsin by the shore of Lake Michigan. We approached the cemetery on a long, lonely country road in the middle of cornfields that stretched as far as we could see.  Not too far away is a beautiful lake that appears to be in the middle of a resort community. 

Mound Prairie Cemetery is just ahead at the line of trees.

We turned into the cemetery, drove toward the back and parked. Methodically, we walked up and down the rows of gravestones looking for Ada Crofford's. Ada was my maternal great grandmother. I knew a lot about her life and this was a big moment for me. After a while, Drew called me over. Ada's stone was barely readable, but there she was next to Robert Luke, her son-in-law, and two of the Luke grandchildren, Catherine and Lowell.  

I stood for a few long minutes at this grave.

Looking back toward the entrance to the cemetery. Ada's grave
can be seen along the road to the right, beside the graves
of the Luke family.

My thoughts of Ada as I stood there were to marvel at how she lived in so many places and lived such a rough pioneer life only to end up in this place that had nothing to do with her life. She was born in New York. She had lived in Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Missouri, and Illinois. Then finally buried in Wisconsin. Her very life and death represents the restless spirit of the Old West. 

Drew and I searched in vain for my great aunt Miriam's grave. Miriam was my grandfather's sister. I have memories of receiving regular gifts in the mail as a child from Aunt Miriam. She was married first to Robert Luke, then to Mr. Darrow. We walked around for a good 30-45 minutes looking at every gravestone. I came to the conclusion that maybe she wasn't buried there after all. After I got home, I did some checking and found that she is buried there and we just missed it somehow. Here is a picture of her gravestone that I found online:

From Findagrave.com

I learned from Mom that Miriam's first husband Robert Luke was killed at age 40 by a train that hit his car. After further searching, I learned that two of Miriam's daughters, Emma and Catherine, twins, were also killed in separate automobile accidents. [Mom kept a gold bracelet that had belonged to her cousins.] Catherine and Robert are buried next to Ada at Twin Lakes. There was a news article about the three family tragedies:

John Dillingham

The next cemetery we visited was in Liberty, Indiana. We stopped first at the Brown museum in an old house in nearby Chesterton. The ladies who worked there were enthusiastic and brought out many binders of documentation on my ancestor, John Dillingham, who was an original settler in the area. We set out for Liberty, traveled down more country roads and almost missed the tiny plot of graves. The Dillingham monuments stood tall among the other worn headstones in the tiny family cemetery. A power substation was built next to the plot. 

From behind the cemetery looking toward the road.

Olcott, John's son by his first wife, Clarissa.
Olcott had traveled with John from Ohio to settle in Indiana.

Standing next to John Dillingham's gravestone.
Hannah's memorial is on the other side of the same
monument.

Later, a fellow relative in the Dillingham family (Cole) sent me a photo of something I missed seeing... the house of Olcott Dillingham, son of John Dillingham. It was right behind the cemetery but seemed like private property so I hadn't explored it. John Dillingham, my 3Xgg, probably lived in this house at the end of his life. Amazing to imagine!

New Haven, Connecticut

I have traced several branches of our family tree back to New Haven during colonial times.

Capt. Daniel Hall, my maternal 7th great grandfather, lived in nearby Wallingford with his wife Thankful Lyman from Middletown, CT.  Abraham Hall, my 6th great grandfather, lived in New Haven with his wife, Sarah Doolittle. Abraham is buried in Center Street Cemetery, Wallingford, which is close to Doolittle Park.

Capt. Daniel Hall > Abraham Hall > Medad Hall > Elisha Hall > Alfred King Hall > Andrew A. Hall > Ada C. Hall > Horace C. Crofford > Virginia M. Crofford > Teresa Zaun Austin

John Hopkins, my 7th great grandfather (maternal), operated a grist mill in New Haven built by his father Stephen Hopkins of Hartford.

Lt. John Hopkins > Mary Hopkins > Abraham Hickcox > Jared Hickcox > Hannah Hickcox > Anna Dillingham > Horace C. Crofford > Horace C. Crofford > Virginia M. Crofford > Teresa Zaun Austin

Some of our ancestors, both maternal and paternal, are buried in a famous graveyard on what is now called, "Center Church on the Green."  The original cemetery is gone, but many of the gravestones are preserved underneath the church building.
http://www.newhavencenterchurch.org/history.html

I will add the names of our ancestors buried there as I discover them.

From my maternal grandfather's lineage:

Eleazer Brown 1642 - 1714 (my 8th great grandfather)

Sarah Buckley Brown 1640-1723 (my 8th great grandmother)

From my paternal grandfather's lineage:

Nathaniel Bradley 1661-1745 (my 7th great grandfather)

Ruth Dickerman Bradley 1668-1725 (my 7th great grandmother)

Alice Prichard Bradley 1625-1692 (my 8th great grandmother)

Bethlehem Cemetery

My great grandparents, John Adam and Elizabeth Zaun, came to America from Germany in 1867.  I had heard of them, but knew nothing at all about them.  Last fall, I discovered online that they were buried in Bethlehem Cemetery in Richmond.  This was a surprise -  I  previously had no idea where they had lived or died.  Furthermore, it said the cemetery was on Penick Road.  That road was very familiar to me, as it was the street address of my great grandparents.  When I was growing up, my family made the pilgrimage to the little house on Penick Road to see "Nannie and Poppoo" about twice a year.  I wrote them letters regularly as a child, so the address was permanently forged in my memory.

In November 2013, my sister and her husband and I were on our way to a relative's birthday party in the Richmond area, so we decided to stop at the cemetery to see if we could find the graves.  It was a tiny cemetery and many of the stones were very old and illegible.  But as we searched, we found other ancestors' graves.  Everywhere we turned, it seemed, we saw another family name!  Powell, Abbott, Lukhard, Bryant, Zaun, Wright... we even found the graves of infants that we never knew existed.  I took pictures of all of their tombstones.

When I got home and uploaded the photos, I noticed an astonishing coincidence.  My photo of my great grandmother's grave, Ida Rene Abbott, was taken from the same angle as a photo taken in 1933, the day she was buried.  The same shot, 80 years apart! The church in the background looked the same.

In another old photo in my collection, my great great grandfather Jefferson Monroe Powell is standing next to a plaque honoring my great great grandmother Powell - I realized that this picture was taken at the same church.

Teresa Marie Allen, part 1

When I first began dabbling in ancestry research a year and half ago, progress happened so fast it was mind-blowing.  On Ancestry.com, it took no time at all to follow some family lines all the way back to medieval times in Europe (Europe has much better historical and genealogical records).  I happily paid the annual fee to join Ancestry.com so I could continue the excitement.  Then it began to be tedious as each branch of the family reached the end and the facts were more and more difficult to find.  Still, random discoveries have kept the fire burning.

Since I do not subscribe the International version of Ancestry, our tree mostly begins with the original immigrants to America.  But overall, it is an impressive assemblage of ancestors!   There are some famous and admirable folks in our family lineage, such as Roger Williams (founder of Providence RI) and Joost Van Den Vondel (the Shakespeare of the Netherlands).  Governors, religious leaders, pioneers, colonists, soldiers of the Revolution... I can't even begin to wrap my mind around it all.

I have learned to be discriminating about sources.  Sloppy research can become a contagion on Ancestry.com as researchers build on inaccurate facts from other family trees.  For instance, when double-checking the facts, I couldn't actually prove a Mayflower connection with reliable sources though there was some anecdotal evidence; therefore, I reluctantly disconnected that link from the tree.  Working on the research only occasionally and for short periods of time, I have spent most of the time over the last few months looking over my sources, fleshing out facts, and adding media.

Start with the biggest question
Last night, I decided to pick a random ancestor to investigate.  My maternal grandmother's lineage has been the most confounding mystery in our family tree, so I chose to look again at my long lost great-grandmother Eva L. Allen, who was born in Illinois.  I had previously been unable to find anything about her after 1900.  I was mainly concerned with finding proof that my grandmother "Teresa" was the same person as "Ethelyn" who was documented as the only child of Augustus and Eva Allen.  I did a search for "Eva L. Allen" on findagrave.com, and was surprised when a 2010 entry took me to Oklahoma.  It turns out that around 1998, an inmate at a low level security prison in Oklahoma had cleared out an old, overgrown cemetery at nearby Old Fort Supply and uncovered hundreds of grave markers no larger than bricks.

Cemetery at Old Fort Supply
http://yireng.blogspot.com/2013/06/another-old-cemetery.html

This photo was taken after 1908 in the early days of the mental hospital. It shows the north line of barracks used as wards. Some of the trees on either side of the road are still there. The tree-lined road or path led from the Superintendent's home, the former Commanding Officer Quarters to the hospital administration offices.
(Fort Supply Historic Site Facebook page).

The graves were of patients who had died at the mental hospital at Fort Supply.  One of them was Eva L. Allen, 1867-1911.  A mental hospital...!  Sure enough, Eva L. Allen is listed on the 1910 census as a patient at the hospital.  My heart raced as I checked facts against each other to be sure it was the right person.  I already knew that, according to the 1920 census, my grandmother had lived in a boarding house in Oklahoma City which is not far from where her mother had died. There were just too many coincidences to dismiss the information.  Sadly, Teresa never knew what became of her mother.  Raised by nuns at a Catholic boarding school in Texas, she remembered a visit from her father, Augustus, but she never knew what happened to him either.  Teresa attended a nursing school in Paris, Texas - I tried to identify the school and came up with St. Joseph Hospital, which was run by nuns.  No proof... yet.  Mom and I conjecture that she changed her name while she was at this school, from Ethelyn to Teresa Marie (perhaps named for a favorite nun?) UPDATE:  see later post with more information about Teresa! 

Update, January 2, 2015:
Further research has brought up more questions about Augustus D. Allen.  I have created a timeline of confirmed events.

Year - Source - Subject - related persons:
1860 Census, Warsaw, Ill.  Augustus, age 1.  (Robert, b. Va.; Elizabeth, b. Ohio)
1870 Census, Hancock, Ill.  Augustus, age 11. (Elizabeth, widowed)
         Census, Littleton, Ill.  (Schuyler County) Eva L. Bosworth, age 3. (OM, Eliza)
1880 Census, Littleton, Ill.  Eva L. Bosworth, age 13. (MO, b. Ohio; Eliza, b. Kentucky)
1883 Marriage record, Littleton, Ill.  Augustus m. Eva on Nov. 25. (Robert, Elizabeth, Orlando, Eliza)
1890 .... (Census destroyed by fire).
1900 Census, Wichita, Kansas.  Augustus, real estate agent (Eva, Eliza, Ethelyn, b. abt 1893)
1904 City Directory, Wichita.  Eva L. Allen, widow of A.D.
1910 Census, Woodward, Oklahoma.  Eva, widow, age 43.
1920 Census, Oklahoma City.  Teresa, age 26.  (fellow boarder, Maude Marshall)
1930 Census, Waukegan, Ill.  Horace, Teresa, H.C. Jr.

This is where it gets tricky... there is documentation of "Augustus D. Allen" residing in Sedgwick, Kansas after Eva was supposedly widowed.  Like my ancestor, this Augustus was also born in Hancock, Ill. and moved to Wichita in 1900.  He was also a real estate agent.  In 1905, the year after Eva was listed as a widow, this Augustus married "Miss Emma Schindler" and became a well known business tycoon in the Wichita area, opening his own Realty Co. on Douglas Avenue in Wichita. (Coincidentally my grandmother grew up thinking her father's middle name was Douglas).  A brief biography by O.H. Bentley does not mention either Eva or Ethelyn/Teresa.  His year of birth is given as 1865, six years later than my ancestor. Also my ancestor was not known to have a love of horses, and he was not orphaned at a very young age (though his father died when he was a small boy; his mother died in the 1890s). This Augustus must have died sometime between 1911 and 1925* because Emma is listed as a widow in the Wichita directory in 1925.  To complicate matters further, there is an Augustus D. Allen listed in Dallas, Tx, in 1915, spouse Emma S.; occupation, grocer. (Dallas is close to where my grandmother was living in an orphanage).

In 1905, Sedgwick County had a population of about 45,000.  What are the chances that there were two Augustus D. Allens, both real estate agents, born in Hancock, Ill., and moving to Wichita the same year?  Did my ancestor die before 1904, or did he live to 1917?  Did he die, or did he abandon his family to start a new life?  If he lived, why the discrepancy in birth year?   Did Eva claim to be a widow rather than bear the shame of divorce?  Was Eva mentally ill, or was she a victim of circumstance?  And the biggest question of all.... Are Ethelyn and Teresa the same person, or am I completely on the wrong track with her parentage?

Augustus D. with Eva
and seven year old Ethelyn