Stories in Stone

There are stories to be found in those quiet old cemeteries, though we may never be able to understand  just what happened, the clues are left behind for us to piece together, if we can.

At Oaklands Cemetery, just outside of West Chester, PA, I came across such a challenge in the Meconkey plot. In the center of the plot stands an obelisk, with names on only two sides - David 1799-1868 and Catherine 1819-1843. In addition to their names on the monument, David and Catherine have plain marker stones near the base of the obelisk. Catherine, David's first wife, died the year after their second son, Richard, was born. They also had a son, Elbridge, who was born two years before Richard. Elbridge died in 1887 and is known to be buried in Harrisburg. In 1851, David remarried, his second wife being Sarah Brinton, who died in 1888. Her marker is in the plot, along with one for her mother, Sibbilla (Kirk) Brinton. Sarah's father, Joseph Hill Brinton, is buried at Birmingham-Lafayette, south of West Chester. But there is one stone in that plot that cannot be identified because there is simply not enough of it left to decipher.

As you can see, there's not much there to work with - the stone looks like the top wore off completely. One possibility that comes to mind is that the stone might be that of David's father, John Meconkey, but since I don't know where or when he died, I have no way at this point of determining if the stone is his. David's mother was Elizabeth Rickabaugh and her stone is in the Union Hall cemetery on Flat Road, though there is no sign of a stone there for her husband. 

The other possibility is that the stone was for David's second son Richard, who died in 1873. Richard, apparently, was a troubled young man and had been having mental problems from his college years onward, ultimately committing suicide by drowning in a local reservoir. Finding out about Richard was a bi of a challenge in itself, but the story was told in the Harvard Class report from 1874 for his class:

RICHARD JONES MECONKEY. He remained at home on his father's farm (West Chester, Penn.), his health slowly but gradually improving, until towards the close of the year 1872, when a change for the worse took place in his condition. It soon became manifest that he would again have to be removed to an asylum, in which he had been placed soon after leaving Cambridge in 1864. He begged to be allowed his liberty a little longer, promising not to injure himself or others. On the afternoon of February 5, 1873, however, he managed to escape from his attendant, and was soon found alone in the reservoir, into which he had thrown himself. All efforts to resuscitate him proved fruitless.

Could the mystery stone be Richard's? And if it is, why is it in such bad shape?

Shoot 'Em All

When I make a trip to a cemetery to photograph the gravestones of ancestors, I'm usually coming from at least two hours away so I want to make the trip worthwhile. As long as I'm there, I might as well photograph as many stones as possible. There are actually several reasons I do this - one of which is because there may be related stones nearby that may fit into the family tree. I also take the extra shots because I want to document the graveyard itself for the sake of others' research. So, typically, I'll come back from a trip with several hundred photographs needing to be identified.

Since I use a digital camera, it's very easy to take lots of pictures quickly, but the identification process takes quite a bit longer at time. My typical process is to import all the pictures into a single directory on my computer, and then copy them into individual folders for each cemetery. Within the individual folders, I create two new directories: Working and Done. The photos get copied again into the Working directory, where they are cropped if necessary and then resized for posting to the web. As each one is identified and uploaded to my genealogy program, I move it to the Done folder. Over time, the Working folders get emptied, but it may take a long time in some cases, because I don't upload the photos until I have tied the individual into an existing family within my database.

Typically, I'll take pictures in rows, so that the related stones are in the order in which they appear in the graveyard. Sometimes, they're be in adjacent rows, in the case of a larger family plot, but the idea is the same, to keep the family members together in the pictures. This helps to identify them later, as the numbers of the photographs will show their relative placements.

Sometimes, these nearby stones can reveal additional relationships. I was recently at Spring Hill Cemetery in Cumberland county, PA and found the stone within the family plot for my great-grandmother's sister and discovered that she had apparently remarried several years before she died. Her stone was there, next to her sister and brother-in-law, but with a surname I didn't recognize. I still don't know who her second husband was, since there was no stone for him nearby, but eventually he'll be found, I suppose.

Keeping Track of Research

I use an online system called The Next Generation (TNG) hosted on a personal site to keep track of all my genealogy research, but I also use some other tools to help keep track of the information. One of those other tools is a nifty little piece of linux software called View Your Mind, which is meant to be used for brain-storming, but it also works great for building family trees!

The image above shows a screenshot of this program in operation. If you notice there are a few icons on some of the lines. The hearts show where I have documents to support the marriage and the lifesaver represents that there is a will documented. This is just one little section of the full tree, but it helps me see at a glance how the relationships work out. Once I know where they are buried, I add a rose icon to represent their burial and ultimately a green check mark if I have a photograph of their stone. Where there are no icons at all, further research is needed, but the map makes it easy to see where those areas are that need more information.

Tracking Them Down

One of my personal research goals has been to locate the final resting places of as many of my direct line ancestors as possible, easier said than done in some cases. Ideally, I would find them and take a photograph of their stone. It's a multi-part project with the first step, obviously, being to find out who they were. Since I've been at this project for quite a few years now, I've gotten to the point that I have at least five generations back for all of my direct line, and in many cases, a good bit beyond that. Though there are some that I have tracked even further back than when they arrived in America, that has been the point at which I stop when doing my research generally. As it is, that still gives me an awful lot of ancestors to locate.

So, the next step, after figuring out who they were, is to determine where they were buried, and that can be a real challenge! I use a lot of different types of resources to locate them:

• Published church records
• Find-A-Grave (http://findagrave.com)
• Obituaries
• Death records
• Funeral home records
• Published family genealogies
• Personal research, both my own and that of others

In most cases, it is a combination of records that allows me to pinpoint the final resting place and I've learned that mistakes can show up in just about any type of record. 

Just What Is Grave Spotting?

OK, I admit it, I made the term up. I'm using it as a generic term for my hobby of searching out the places where my ancestors have ended their days, along with some of the more interesting stories that I come across in the process. I've been doing this genealogy thing for quite a few years now so I've ended up with lots of tidbits of data and tons of pictures, especially since I've become the unofficial family historian.

One thing I've found over the years of chatting with others who enjoy this hobby, is that most folks tend to focus on particular ares in their research - some work a lot with census records, others with old church records and so on. While I use those as well, my focus has always been on using the information found in graveyards to document my ancestors (and quite a few that aren't ancestors as well). Part of the reason that I do this is because gravestones are generally pretty accurate since they are created at the actual time of the event, rather than years later. While it is possible for the information on a stone to be wrong, it seems to happen far less frequently than the errors that are found in many other types of records.

So, yeah, I look for dead people, as my daughter and husband refer to my hobby.