Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Tombstone Tuesday: Mystery of the Leaning Stone

Sometimes you just have to wonder. At the Olympus Cemetery in Grove, OK, I came across this grave. Remarkable in itself because it is one of the oldest persons buried in a traditional cemetery in Oklahoma. We just don't have a lot of really old cemeteries. It is the grave of Rebecca Boone Wainscott, b. Oct. 23, 1808, d. Feb. 26, 1892.


But the mystery comes in when I looked at the stone leaning against the back of Rebecca's stone. It is broken so there is no name visible but the last letters of the word above the break could be SCOTT. It has the same born day, Oct. 23, 1808 but a different died day, Jan. 20, 1893.

I searched for information to resolve the mystery of the leaning stone, but have not been able to find anything to help solve the mystery. As far as I have been able to determine she is the only Wainscott buried in Delaware County.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Tombstone Tuesday: Les Miserables

Sometimes you wish you had been around sooner. While looking for some Cheek family graves at the Olympus Cemetery in Grove, OK, I came across this stone. It has fallen, cracked in half, and is now embedded into the turf. There were no other graves around it that it seemed to belong to. The inscription is

RICHARD
son of
J. W. and F. J.
DAWES
BORN
June 1891
DIED
August 1891

Our little darling
sleeps sweetly in . . .

Someone has added to the Find A Grave memorial that the parents are Jonathan Welch Dawes and Phoebe Jane Kidd Dawes. Perhaps some family member will come across it and provide some mcu needed TLC for the grave.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Tombstone Tuesday: Five in One


I previously posted about a three-in-one stone on the grave of my great grandparents, but just found in my files a five-in-one stone from the Brewer Cemetery in Franklin County, AR. My wife, whose mother was a Brewer from Franklin County, and I came across this cemetery quite by accident when driving through the hills (they call them mountains) of western Arkansas. We had just come around a rather sharp bend in the road and started up a fairly steep hill when I saw the Brewer Cemetery sign. We have not found any connection so far between her Brewers and those in the cemetery but we are still looking. I have posted most of the pictures I took that day at the Find-a-Grave site. Among the many Brewer stones was this one of the Elliot Hall family which includes father Elliot and mother Isabelle, sons Saloman and Edgar, and grandson Fred.

The stone did not have any dates but I discovered that Elliot was born 25 October 1852 in Missouri and died in 1913. His parents are Levi Hall and Rebecca Cooper, originally from Ohio. Isabelle was born 16 November 1869 in Greenup, KY and died in 1906. Her parents are Calvin and Sarah Jennings, also from Kentucky. I don't have any additional information on the sons and grandson buried with them. They did have another son, Jesse Homer Hall, b. 4 December 1895 in Franklin County, d. 14 September 1953 in Tucson, AZ.



There are other interesting gravestones in the cemetery which will have to be included in subsequent contributions to Tombstone Tuesday.