Every Rose Has its Thorn

Most of the summer was too hot for even short hunts. I could sneak in a little one here or there, but my overly-ambitious effort on a steamy July 4th at a large cemetery in Desoto pretty much knocked me off my game for a while. It wasn’t supposed to be a huge deal, findagrave reported the cemetery only had five hundred internments, that number turned out to be only a fraction of reality. I found a few, then quit after only covering half the enormous field. I was covered in sweat, weak and sore from overestimating my physical capacity.

Now that the weather has cooled, and the fact that October is my favorite month of the year I felt motivated again to get outside and enjoy the search once again.

October is my favorite, not just because it’s cooler, but more so because of the lower angle of the sun. Most of my favorite photographs were taken in October, colors sharp, blue skies bluer and the air, clearer.

I had a couple of new requests in Hillsboro so I decided to go local first, to get back into the swing. There were a couple of  older requests that I hadn’t been able to find the last time, so I expanded my list to four and decided to make a full-grid, row-by-row search.

The weather was perfect on this early Sunday afternoon. I started in the northwest corner where most of the older graves are located. About halfway through that section another car pulled into the cemetery and stopped just inside the center gate. A lady, of at least retirement age, stepped out with a modest bouquet of faux-flowers in her hand. This is of course, not uncommon. I made an effort to keep my distance out of respect. I went on about my business. I noticed her again about five minutes later in the northeast section, then several minutes later in the southeast. As my search was moving south we passed, she smiled and greeted me the way strangers do when they meet each other in cemeteries. A smile, but not too big of one. A few minutes later I looked up and she was heading right toward me, the flowers still in her hand.

“I wish they had maps of this place.” She said.

“It certainly would make things go quicker.” I answered, as I was getting frustrated myself after an hour or so and only having found one of the four possible graves. I almost added “But that would take all the fun out of it.” But decided against it as it might have seemed in bad taste.

“Well, if you really need a map, Matt Woods, the insurance guy, may have one. He’s one of the caretakers.” I offered. I met Matt back in the spring on volunteer cleanup day (see previous posts)

“I know Matt, I had him in Kindergarten.” She replied.

“Really?”

“Yeah, he’s a good boy.” She then went on telling me about the history of stewardship of the cemetery and even pointed out where the late congressman Bill Emerson was buried. She quickly proved to me she knew quite a bit about quite a few of the people of Hillsboro. I asked her the name of the person she was searching for, she answered “Huskey, Chris Huskey.” A very common surname in this cemetery. I told her I’d keep an eye open as I continued my own search.  She headed down the hill a bit and I paced a couple more rows until I realized that the names I were looking for had eluded me before and that I had now, right in front of me a new name for the list. It didn’t matter that it was not for findagrave, I decided, I am a cemetery searcher, a volunteer grave finder with hundreds of successful finds under my belt. So I cancelled my list search and headed to the areas that more likely fit the description she had provided. She had said that he was buried less than a year before, which led me to stop looking at stones alone, and at the ground itself. Less than a year after burial meant that most likely the soil had not had a chance to settle and grass-over completely. There’s hundreds of graves in the cemetery, but not that many newer ones. I also considered the possibility that no stone had been erected, which would be bad news as the life span of those temporary, metal funeral home markers is pretty short, I’ve seen several mangled ones that had been chewed up and spit out by industrial mowers. But she had said that he was buried next to his grandparents, also Huskey’s. So all I really needed to do was find a Huskey grave with a fresh plot near it.

We crossed paths a couple more times, I was doing a three-four row quick-search, she was just sort of wandering around. At one point she made a phone call, but didn’t seem to have learned anything useful.

I found it.

Fairly fresh grave, covered with squares of turf that hadn’t quite filled in together, with a shiny, fresh stone.

Christopher Michael Huskey October 2 1981 – February 18, 2011.

October 2, 1981. This would have been his thirtieth birthday. A kid.

Beneath the name and dates were etched a musical staff with a treble clef and couple of musical notes, underneath that were the words: “Every rose has its thorn”

I recognized the words as the title of a late 80’s power ballad by the band ‘Poison’. I assumed that Chris had been a fan of music, and maybe that song in particular.

I called out to the lady, waved and got her attention. As I waited I snapped a couple of pictures then looked around. There was no stone for Sam and Anita Huskey as the lady had said there would be, this only punctuated the fact that not all clues in these hunts are accurate. People’s memories sometimes simply fill in gaps with plausibilities. She had mentioned that at the time of the funeral, she had stayed back at the church while the family and friends attended the burial, which explained why she did not know its exact location and was going by what the family had told her a while back.

She stepped up to the grave and laid the bundle of plastic flowers at the headstone. She stepped back, I let her have her time uninterrupted.

“So sad” she sighed.

“So young.” I responded, “I don’t recall really living until I was older than that.”

She shook her head. “Too young.” She answered, “and so sad that he took his own life.” Her voice trembled a little.

My heart sunk into my belly. I had no idea what to say. There was a truly sad story here, a recent, very tragic story and my insane reflex for irony, dark humor and making jokes when uncomfortable needed to be suppressed, so I said nothing at all.

She didn’t offer any more details about the circumstances surrounding his death, I figured if she wanted or needed to, she would. Grief is a powerful emotion, it manifests itself in millions of ways. She seemed quiet, a bit sad, but not overwhelmingly so. She did go on to tell me that he too was a former student of hers and that she was there on behalf of his parents. “This is the first birthday since he died, his folks couldn’t handle visiting themselves, they went to California to visit his brother instead.”

“I understand.” I answered, because I did.

She looked up and smiled. “I didn’t mean to take you away from what you were doing.” She apologized.

I explained to her what I was doing and that it was no problem at all, glad to be able to help.

I didn’t know how she would react to my hobby, some people actually see it as an intrusion, a defacement, even ‘trespassing for personal gain’. People can be quite sensitive about death and cemeteries. This is why I try to avoid people when I’m on a search. I don’t want to rile them up in their time of grief. Fortunately, she was not one of those. “Well, that’s a really nice thing you do.” She said with a look of genuineness, and the kind, patient, caring eyes of a kindergarten teacher.

“Thanks you very much for helping me find it, I was about to give up.” She added.

“It’s not a problem ma’am, it’s what I do.”

We left our separate ways, her with the satisfaction of appropriately commemorating the tragic passing of a young man on behalf of his grieving parents, I, with enough good-deed contentment to last me several days or maybe even weeks.

I got home and fired up the laptop and uploaded the photos. His name was already in the system but there were no pictures. I fixed that. Whoever had created his memorial had included an obituary:

“Christopher Michael Huskey, age 29, of Hillsboro Missouri, passed away on February 18, 2011. He was born October 2, 1981 in St. Louis, Missouri. Chris was an Electronic Technician at Midwest Associates of Hillsboro Missouri, student at Jefferson College and a member of the Fire Box Band. Survived by Wife- Christa J. Huskey of Hillsboro Missouri. Son-Timothy Michael Davidson of Fenton Missouri. . .”

I still don’t know quite what to make of it. I have no idea what caused him so much pain and anguish. I can only imagine that borne by his family, his child, his wife, his parents. Only time will help with the healing, I am told, though most likely it will never completely heal. The death of a loved one leaves a permanent scar on the loved ones. A tragedy such as this, a much deeper and more jagged one. So many questions, so many unknowns. So much promise, so much potential, so much life unfulfilled.

The Sunday before Memorial Day.

Always a good time of year to visit cemeteries, this late May morning was warm and sunny. Fresh, crisp American flags dotted the green grass. Fresh flowers were in place on several graves, and a few people stopped by to primp, decorate and smile/cry.

Calvary Cemetery is one of DeSoto’s large ones, located north of the city proper. Over two thousand graves on a gentle but noticeable hillside. Its proximity to a busy and noisy car wash make it a little less than peaceful.

The cemetery goes back many years is very well maintained and still taking in new burials. Several fresh graves stood out brown against the recently mowed grass.

I parked at the bottom of the hill in front of the small, tidy mausoleum/chapel, the only shady spot I could both get to and be out of the way.

Calvary was chosen once again for the high ratio of requests vs. internments, still trying to knock out the most in one trip as possible. Since autumn of last year thirteen new requests had come in, adding to the four that I could not locate there last year.

The list was promising, several with deaths recorded in the mid 1900’s, several with familiar family names. I had a list of seventeen in a five – seven acre field.

I McGyver-ed up a new gadget this trip. I folded the list in quarters so that the important columns were visible over two sides, then used a hole punch to cut an inch-long channel in one side to allow me to attach a retractable clip to it. It’s one of those things people clip to their belt so they can dangle access/ID cards yet have them easily accessible. This worked much better than just shoving the list into my sweaty pocket. I also clipped a ballpoint to it to mark off the names as I found them.

This was a full grid search, starting at the eastern-most point since that’s the direction the vast majority of the stones pointed. They were lined up pretty well, though it still took nearly two hours to zig-zag from one end to the other.

Four of the names, all ‘Martin’s’ I had little hope for. I couldn’t find them the last time I went, and a cross-reference with the Historical Society’s transcription list didn’t show them either. I kept the surname in my head though which was pretty easy since another cluster of three had shared the family name Lewis. Martin and Lewis, get it? No? Maybe you’re just not old enough.

Which leads to memory tricks of the trade. My list this day had eleven different family names. I do not have a photographic memory. So the first thing I do is sit for a moment and read though the list of names, last name only, over and over, about twenty or more times. Reading them aloud helps too, and it also helps to mispronounce them to make them more memorable. For example certain German-ish names which are very common in these parts can be difficult to try to pronounce/memorize without assistance, but if that name is ‘Schnitker’, well, use your imagination. All that is needed is to get close enough, then a cross reference to the list itself at that point will take care of the rest.

So up and down we go, (literally up and down at this cemetery, my calves are screaming today.) looking as deep as possible, looking for names on stones to trigger a familiarity. When a name pops, I cross-check. If it is that family name I snap a photo whether it is exactly the stone I’m looking for or not, a new policy of mine. If it is an exact match, I cross it out on the list.

The only downside is a big list against a big cemetery, sometimes about mid-way through a lot more names seem familiar as I’ve been reading off hundreds of them, many of them fairly common. I don’t know how many times I stopped at ‘Boyer’ thinking that it was on the list, it wasn’t, there’s just a whole bunch of Boyer’s in this cemetery.

After that it’s just diligence, perseverance and vigilance. Of the list of new requests, I only didn’t find two exact matches, a Pashia, though there were other Pashia’s that I did photograph, and a Bates. The Bates name didn’t show up on the Jeffco transcription list either. So it is likely that on the entire list, I only missed one.

They’ll remain on the list, as with the Martin’s from last year so when I, or another volunteer swings through again there will be another opportunity to find them.

Interesting additional data this week, one of those I found had an obituary posted on Find A Grave,

Memorial# 67232385

Ronald Warden

Dayton Ohio Fire Dept.

Appointed: July 5, 1960
Died: March 9, 1965
Ron Warden was stationed at Company 6 at Third and Montgomery Streets. In addition to his firefighting duties, he was the company cook.
During a fire at the Ungerleider Motor Co. at 415 N. Main Street, part of the building collapsed trapping Ron and two other firefighters. Two of the firefighters were trapped only briefly and escaped with minor injuries. Ron was apparently crushed by an I-beam during the collapse. He had just celebrated his 28th birthday.

Also on my list was Agnes Crabtree, 1918-1997. Only interesting in that my father’s lineage has Crabtree branches.

And finally in honor of Memorial Day, and those for whom we set aside this day to memorialize, Mr. Schnitker’s Government Issue footstone:

It took five shots on a very windy day to get the little flag to cooperate for this desired result.

Newspaper Obituary and Death Notice
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO) - October 7, 1999
Deceased Name: Wilfred A. "Bill" Schnitker
75, of De Soto, died Saturday (Oct. 2, 1999) at Jefferson Memorial Hospital in Crystal City.
Mr. Schnitker was a carman for Union Pacific Railroad. He was a life member of De Soto Elks Lodge 689 and AMVETS Post 48 and was past Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus. He served in the Army in World War II and during the Berlin crisis. He was retired from the Army Missouri National Guard's 1035th Division.

Thanks Mr. Schnitker.

The New Season Finally Begins

Winter proved completely unrealistic for finding graves. However that did not stop the requests from flowing in. From late September through mid-April nearly a hundred requests came in for Jefferson County cemeteries. March-April proved to be mostly a wash, often literally. Weekends without rain or storms were nearly non-existent. It was actually only in late April that the weather and my available time finally lined up.

The season’s first trip was to the closest to my home in Hillsboro.

Uneventful really, there were just a few requests, one was for an old (1893) monolith for a member of the Marsden family. Marsden’s have been a feature in JeffCo for a very long time.

In Early May I scanned thorough the requests. I decided to go for a good ratio. This is not exactly scientific. The big cemeteries in DeSoto and Festus were racking up requests, but finding twenty-odd stones in a field of several thousand is a real commitment of precious time. Smaller cemeteries with five or six requests offer more bang for the buck. I’ll get to the big ones eventually, they just take more preparation.

Charter Cemetery outside Festus was my best choice, eleven requests in a cemetery of around eight hundred graves. It had the added bonus that I’d not been there before. The Church is still standing and active, the cemetery was well cared for and had a few fairly recent burials. The oldest stones were scattered out among the newer ones, indicating that the church, long ago set aside the bulk of the adjoining land for this purpose.

Some cemeteries are clearly demarcated between old and new, the sign of a small beginning with more land added later, like in Hillsboro. If I get a pre-1910 request there I pretty much know exactly where to start. Charter Baptist required a full grid search. Fortunately it was well aligned and most stones faced the same direction (usually east).

I found the first two right next to each other. There were others of those same family names in the immediate vicinity so, as is my custom, I photo’d those as well. This paid off a few days later as a new request came in for one of those same-name stones.

Uploading the photos is a time and resource consuming process, so I tend to fulfill requests first, and then the same-names only as I have time, so I have a bunch on my laptop that haven’t been uploaded yet. I store the photos by cemetery name, so it’s not hard to scan the directories for them at a later date. So now the process of handling requests includes first checking to see if I might already have a photo on file.This happened once over the winter with a request for one of the priests at Liguori.

If you’ll recall, I also check requests against the Jefferson County Historical Society’s transcription lists. For Charter Baptist, the transcription list was spot on. Of the eleven requests, only five appeared on those lists, and I found those five, and no more.

With this kind of cross verification, I feel confident posting a message to the request on Find-A-Grave:

“Searched entire cemetery, found no marker this name. A search of transcriptions provided by the local historical society showed no record either.”

In one case, an infant by the name of Neff I received an email form the requestor:

“I found that he was buried at the Charter Church Cemetery from these 2 sources:

Allen's Missouri Death Certificate.

Jefferson County Historical Society website on their Jefferson County, MO Funeral Home Records for Coxwell Funeral Home.”

This was not necessarily contradictory. The Death certificate from August 1922 was available online and sure enough there was a hand-written reference to burial in Charter Cemetery. And of course there’s the funeral home record. The death certificate medically and statutorily certifies death, but is not necessarily a solid, reliable source for burial. Think about it. A Doctor signs the certificate. This may occur days before services and internment have been figured out.

Funeral home records certify a service took place and almost always mention where the subsequent burial took place, pretty reliable.

I have little doubt that little Baby Neff is actually buried at Charter Baptist Cemetery. It does not mean however that a stone was ever placed there for him.

What my legwork plus the transcription lists indicate for the infant is only that no legible stone with that name exists. Nearly every cemetery I’ve visited has areas of unmarked graves. There’s an entire area in Hillsboro’s that was long devoted to the county’s paupers. None of those have markers or stones.

It is unfortunately not at all unusual for a grave to go unmarked. Limited finances, lack of remaining family, there’s dozens of reasons for this.

I explained to the requestor, Peggy that I would look again when I could, but that the odds were that no stone exists.

Out of curiosity one evening I Google’d the family names listed on the death certificates since neither parent was listed as being buried there. I found their marriage certificate and noticed some interesting data.

Infant Neff’s parents were married one week prior to his death, nearly fifty miles away from Daddy’s listed home address. Those fifty miles go very near some of the highest and most rural points in the state. 1922, a marriage away from home, then a week later, a baby. This was 1922, rural Missouri mind you. In those times and places such a thing, though rather commonplace today, would have been certain grist for the gossip mills. This situation, coupled with the tragic loss of the baby a mere three months later came together in my mind like a chapter out of a John Steinbeck novel.

I’m making no judgment here, I am certainly not stain free. I mentioned as much to Peggy and she, taking no offense, saying that based on my findings, she had opened up a whole new line of curiosity and research for her family tree. It turns out that both parents had been previously married. As we speak she is dialing up and firing off letters to elderly relatives.

This past weekend I made a point to visit the Hillsboro grounds again. I didn’t have any current requests, but I’d noticed in the local paper that there was a cleanup being conducted by local volunteers. It sounded like something that would be beneficial to partake in. I got there late, 9:15 as opposed to the posted start of 8:00. They were all but done by then. I picked up a few fallen branches and set them on the growing pile, then noticed a young lady standing over a stone with a notebook. A few moments later she was doing the same at another stone. I approached her and inquired. She was compiling a list of veterans buried there and there are quite a few.

As we chatted, a man I’d seen tossing bright yellow trash bags into a big white pickup truck came up to us. He told the lady that he was dropping off the trash and would be back soon. He seemed very much the in-charge type so I asked him if there was anything else I could do to help. He looked around and thought for a moment then just replied that no, they were pretty much done.

I explained that I was a grave finder and he seemed okay with that. I complimented him on the cleanup and how this cemetery was one of the best tended small cemeteries in the county. This led to a discussion about county things and areas and history. He even pointed to a tall oak tree in the front and said that it was the county’s hanging tree as best as he could recall.

I further mentioned my investigation into the poor farm and the visit to that neglected, nearly forgotten plot of land. He replied saying that he had a partial list of paupers that were buried in the Hillsboro Cemetery and that if I were to stop by his office sometime he would let me see it.

Which led me to ask him where his office was. His answer caught me off guard but impressed.

“Oh hey! You’re my Insurance Agent then!” I told him. He seemed Pleased.

So here’s to you Matt Woods, thanks for doing the community a real solid.