All Hunt, No Find.

It was a three day weekend, plenty of time to take on a new cemetery, new to me anyhow. I had no fresh requests, but findagrave had several older open requests that I’d simply never gotten around to. As I reviewed the list I was looking for quantity vs. size. A single request in a cemetery of over a thousand interments didn’t leap out at me, those can chew up hours, and recall that success only averages about 50% anyhow. Better, I thought, to go for multiple requests in smaller cemeteries, cull the low hanging fruit first.

I came across Buster Cemetery located in South central Jeff Co. near a town called Valles Mines. Buster listed a little over a hundred interments and four open requests.

I’d not been there before but had always assumed I’d get around to it.

Valles Mines was founded on 1749 by a French (Canadian) guy, Francois Valle. Yeah that’s right, by a guy named (when translated into American) Frankie Valli.

He started by visiting from Quebec (which is in Canada) and buying lead from local natives. He eventually decided to cut out the middle man and open his own mining company. The mining was done the old fashioned way, cheap labor. Some of the lead/zinc he extracted was used by the fledgling American militia to fight the war of independence.

The mines have long since played out, the town is basically a shadow of its former self. Some of the shallow, surface dug mines are still accessible and an effort is underway to build and maintain a museum in Frankie’s (Francois’s) original settlement house.

I cross checked the requests against my tweaked and speedy lookup list compiled from online transcription records. I had one match, which meant that someone had actually come across at least one of the requested markers there. I did not check the ‘notes’ column though, until later.

I printed out a map with directions, and oddly enough remembered to carry it with me. It took about a half hour to get near it, a few more minutes to slow down and actually find it. Pictures of the cemetery online showed a wooden sign over an entrance. The sign had actually fallen since that picture, and the entrance was nothing more than an open section of fence. The old cemetery had been recently and hurriedly mowed, though not detailed.

There were no huge or ornate obelisks or fancy stones. Mostly low–end simple, tilted, leaning, and broken ones scattered amongst a few anonymous field stones. As I stepped out of the car I almost stepped on one stone, right at the entrance, flat on its back and mostly sunken into the ground.

There was sign of recent activity, flags and flowers among the scattered and unevenly spaced graves. Around one fairly recent stone, someone had built a small wooden wall, installed a bench, a message board and two solar yard lights. Not as elaborate as some of the grave-altars I visited in Japan, but still a considerable effort.

It only took a few minutes to check the whole cemetery. Even though the graves were not in straight lines there just weren’t enough of them to make it take very long. I had three family names in my head, McGee, Anderson and Hall. I found a couple of McGee’s but not the right ones. Hall, nothing, Anderson, not the right one. This was frustrating since I’d crosschecked and found one. I had brought my awesome little netbook with me and opened up the speedy spreadsheet. This time I read the ‘notes’ column for the entry I thought I should find:

“s/o Guy & Stell; Infant; Born in of Valles Mines. Did not find”

Allow me to explain. Whenever someone does a proper transcription project at a cemetery, they have with them a previous transcription list. It’s not a blank slate every time. They simply add new finds to the old list and also make a note on the list if they can not locate one that was there before. That’s the deal here. This stone once existed and was legible, but was not found at the last read.

What happened to it?

It sunk into the ground, crumbled, wore down to complete illegibility or was removed. I have no idea in this specific case.

Four requests, zero finds, bad for my average so I re-walked the entire cemetery, photo’d a couple of same-family-name matches (McGee, Anderson), still nothing.

It turns out that the most recent transcription list for Buster had about a dozen “did not find’s” on it, that’s roughly ten percent of the total number of markers.

As I mentioned earlier there were few if any fancy or pricy stones in this cemetery. Buster is a few miles out of town on a country road, if you can really still call Valles Mines a town. There is a house across the road and down a little, and adjacent to the cemetery there is a metal building, perhaps a maintenance garage. Very few cars went buy during my hour-long visit, so this is not along a main route for many people. The cemetery had been mowed in the last few weeks, but no attempt had been made to fix the sign. Many of the markers were either low quality, or hand made, small, concrete slabs with names and dates carved by hand. One was simply concrete with marbles pressed in to spell the names. Several graves had only the funeral homes’ metal markers, one or two of which I noticed, had been mowed to shreds.

Frustrated and saddened I left unfulfilled.

Instead of heading home I drove roughly east to Ste. Genevieve County, a return to Lebanon Baptist Church.

This would be my third trip there in the last month. The first time I ended up arriving during Church services and left quickly, the second I spent some time looking for Pilliard’s and Bailey’s, not finding the requested one, but still adding a new name or two to the requestor’s family search.

Those that I had found were appreciated, but Grace, the requestor, was unrelenting. She queried me about the possibility of there being an extension or second site to the cemetery as all those I’d found were at least a decade older than the one she was looking for. I got in contact with another Jeff Co/Ste G. Co. grave finder, he answered back that yes indeed there was a second section. He did not tell me where it was, but I already had an idea.

I’d noticed a slightly paved drive that went up the hill from the cemetery. I didn’t give it much thought before since I’d not been looking for a supplemental area. So on that hunch alone I drove another thirty minutes to Ste. G.

I drove directly up the hill and sure enough an acre had been cleared out and a hand-painted sign signified that this too was part of the Lebanon Baptist burial field.

Only about a hundred graves, all dated later than the early 1940’s. I found a couple more Bailey’s and a couple of Pilliard’s, and then went ahead and photo’d all the graves so I wouldn’t have to drive back.

None of the graves was for the missing Jonathon Fite Bailey. He reportedly died in 1939, right on the cusp of the transition between the old and the new sections, but a thorough search of both had come up empty. Grace was polite and thankful for the new finds, but hasn’t given up yet looking for a stone for J.F. though I won’t be going back for a while, it’s a long way. It’s my opinion that there is no such stone in that cemetery. That doesn’t mean he isn’t buried there, I just can’t prove that he is. There’s no law saying you have to put down a stone.