Organize Your Family History

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Getting ready for my research trip

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This weekend is the Ancestry Day conference, sponsored by the Midwest Genealogy Center of the Mid-Continent Public Library and Ancestry.com. It’s being held near Independence, Missouri, about four hours from my home in St. Louis. I love conferences and learning opportunities, so I’m really excited to attend.

Attending the conference has given me the perfect opportunity to do a little family history research and meet more-distant family members. My mother was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, and moved with her family to Spokane, Washington, when she was three. I was born in Seattle and moved to Walla Walla, Washington, when I was five. I moved to Missouri in 1989, but have never made the trek to western Missouri to meet my mother’s cousins there.

So on Friday, I will meet several first cousins of my mother, along with her aunt (my grandfather’s sole surviving sibling) and also visit the graves of my mother’s paternal grandparents. I’m really looking forward to meeting these family members ands seeing family landmarks.

The day after the conference, I’m going to travel to Meyer Cemetery, in Hudson, Missouri, to visit the graves of my mother’s maternal grandfather, great grandparents and great great grandparents. I sure hope they have gravestones to provide me with some data. (I struck out last summer with another ancestor’s graveyard.) I had downloaded the book, Genealogy: James McKinley, 1792-1872, Richard Anderson Jeffries, 1823-1914 and Joseph Price, 1818-1904, from Scribd. It’s providing me with plot numbers for the graves in Meyer Cemetery, so I’m hopeful!

It’s already Wednesday so I’m busy trying to get myself together for my first research trip. I figure the things I need to get together are:

  • Directions (of course)
  • Registration information for the conference
  • Synched family tree on my iPhone
  • My file of handwritten (unverified) ancestry charts from previous research attempts, which provide valuable clues and which I suspect I’ll want to refer to during the conference
  • The old photos my mother has given me, in case my cousins haven’t seen them
  • The printed out pages from the e-book, containing directions to Meyer cemetery and plot numbers
  • Chargers so all my devices are working!

It’s so nice to make a list–I already feel less overwhelmed! I’ll be sure and blog about some of the insights I gain at the conference, as well as reflections upon meeting my family members.

This weekend’s find: Application for headstone or marker

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Application for Headstone or MarkerThis weekend, I was searching for burial information for my great grandfather, James Earl Jeffries (1883-1944). His death certificate told me his body had been removed to Appleton City, Missouri for burial. I’m going to southwest Missouri next month and hope to visit his grave. So I’m trying to pinpoint where exactly to go.

Imagine my delight when the second item that came up on a search of his name at Ancestry.com was a link to a government Application for Headstone and Marker. James was a veteran: He had fought in the Philippine Insurrection. His widow, my great grandmother, applied to the War Department for a headstone for his unmarked grave two and a half years after he died.

The form not only tells me that he was buried in Pleasant Grove Cemetery in Appleton City, but it gives me his military rank, company and regiment (and serial number), as well as enlistment and discharge dates, and the fact that he was honorably discharged. Even more intriguingly, it supplies an address in Pueblo, Colorado, for my great grandmother. I had not been aware she lived in Colorado after her husband died. I had thought (from conversations with my mother) that she had moved directly to Spokane, Washington, from Missouri after his death. Her sister, I believe, lived in Pueblo. Time for a conversation with my mother!

Finds like these are always so exciting. To me, there’s something so real about a form filled out by hand. I feel as though I’m there, witnessing a little bit of history. And it’s so wonderful when the hand written form, like this one, is completely legible.

I love a mystery

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I think one of the reasons I enjoy genealogy research so much is that it makes me feel like a detective. The mysteries can be frustrating, but solving them is oh so satisfying.

Today’s mystery: the death date of my great, great grandmother, Antoinette Garlock Brown. I thought I had it nailed. She died in Missouri in 1922, so I had easy access to her death certificate. (In fact, I blogged about finding her death certificate in a blog post called Those Darn Nicknames.) The hand-written death certificate lists January 9, 1922 as her date of death. The filing date is listed as January 11, 1922. It didn’t seem ambiguous to me.

Today, I found a photograph of her headstone at Find A Grave. It clearly states her date of death as February 9, 1922. It’s etched in stone, so it feels very official. I also have a yellowed newspaper clipping of her obituary, which was found among my grandmother’s belongings after she passed away. It, too, lists her date of death as February 9. Unfortunately, that clipping doesn’t show the date of the newspaper nor the name of the newspaper.

When I squinted harder at the death certificate, it started to become a little more equivocal. It looks like the undertaker wrote the bulk of the information, but the medical examiner is the one who filled in the dates. Under age, the undertaker wrote 66 years, 5 months, 26 days. Since she was born August 13, 1855, that would make her death date February 9. Is it possible that the medical examiner got his months mixed up and no one noticed?

I spent some time trying to locate any other record of her death, so far to no avail. I searched for an obituary to try to get a newspaper date (if that obit appeared in January, clearly it would be wrong). It’s hard for me to imagine that both the obituary and the headstone are wrong. But it’s also hard to imagine the medical examiner not knowing what month it is.

I’m bound and determined to solve this mystery. I can’t wait to find out what the answer (and perhaps explanation) is. And when I do I’ll report it here!

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

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Index at Grandview Cemetery showing Nebergalls

The Nebergalls on the cemetery index

As I mentioned in last Thursday’s post, I took a little detour on my way from Walla Walla, Wash., where I was visiting my parents, back to Portland, Ore., where I would get my flight home to St. Louis. My husband, Barry, and I went to La Grande, Ore., to visit the Grandview Cemetery.

I’d read on a US GenNet cemetery index that my great great great grandfather, Thomas Washington Nebergall, was buried at the Grandview Cemetery, in Block 113, Lot 1, Space 5. His next of kin was listed as his wife, Miriam Van Bibber Nebergall, which matched my records. So I figured that was my guy and that a visit to the cemetery might provide me with some verified information about him (of which I have precious little).

We drove the winding roads through the Blue Mountains to La Grande (part of the time we were actually on the Oregon Trail) and managed to find the small cemetery. We found Thomas’s name in an index (pictured), in a big display case with a map. But when we went to Block 113, there was a lot of open grass and only one Nebergall grave stone, despite there being five Nebergalls on the index in that block.

We searched in vain in the hot sun for more Nebergalls and before giving up I telephoned the cemetery office. The gentleman there gave me the only explanation I’d been able to think of, which is that no grave stones were ever made for them. My hopes for finding more info about my grandfather’s great grandfather at the cemetery were dashed.

I was disappointed, but, as Barry reminded me, it’s just all part of the adventure. The search in and of itself is fun (though it’s made more sweet by some great discoveries). I’m confident that eventually I’ll get the information I seek. And I’m not letting it discourage me from looking at more cemeteries! I have many ancestors buried in the state of Missouri, so I expect some road trips before too long.