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.