One of the early needs of any new settlement in the West was a place to bury the dead. That first death in a new community was only a matter of time and someone needed to pick a burial site.
The
first farmsteads often had a family burial plot not far from the farm
buildings. The towns of Sutton, Harvard and Clay Center and others selected
sites near town for their cemeteries. Churches created their own cemeteries
near Sutton, Verona and Saronville and in many rural settings.
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| The gravestone of Luther French first homesteader in the Sutton area in 1870. |
I
understand that graves were found when the first swimming pool was dug in the
Sutton City Park; the park site had been an early burial site. Those graves
were relocated to the city cemetery. That story is on my Research TODO List.
Gravestones
or “monuments” honor those who have died and become a link to our past.
Families used to live in the same place for many generations so people could easily
visit the graves of parents, grandparents and earlier relatives. There was a
strong sense of continuity from graves that served as reminders of deceased
family members. That continuity was broken when people moved away from their
homes. Immigrants to America severed that tie to a specific family location as
did settlers moving west from the Atlantic seaboard who lost their ties to
family burial sites back East as well.
Genealogists
include burial location among the data to collect on ancestors and a photo of
great grandparents graves can be prized find. How many of us have routed a
vacation trip to include visits to cemeteries where some ancestor is buried?
I’ve included visits to cemeteries in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana Kansas, Maine and
Scotland among my own diversions. There is a good chance that visitors you see
in our local cemeteries are from out-of-town, even out-of-state.
Several
months ago a new database was linked into ancestry.com. New “hints” began to
pop up from a web site called www.findagrave.com. The links led
to “memorials” identifying the cemetery where someone was buried often with a
photo of the gravestone. Suddenly one of the challenging pieces of information
was just a keystroke away.
The
findagrave.com website was started in 1995 by Jim Tipton who had a hobby of
finding graves of famous persons. The internet enabled him to share his list of
famous graves and soon a community of people with interests in cemeteries
expanded the list into a website that has grown to include well over 100
million memorials of individuals throughout the country and a more from
international locations.
The
website is the work of thousands of volunteers the majority of them
genealogists. The initial work involved identifying cemeteries and then
indexing graves from cemetery records, from old and current newspaper
obituaries and from walking cemeteries with a clipboard.
Memorials
on the findagrave.com site list the dates and locations of the individual’s
birth and death. There may be links to the graves of parents and children.
There is a place to include a biography of the person where you will often find
a copy of the obituary. And memorials may have photos of the gravestones, of
the individual or family photos.
I
used information on findagrave.com for several months for my own genealogy
research. Then a few months ago I “joined” the community and began contributing
to the site. Members who would like to have a photo of a specific grave can
make a “photo request” which is posted on the page for that cemetery. I began
fulfilling photo requests in the area and taking additional photographs of
gravestones.
Some
cemeteries have had a lot of attention and have been nearly fully photographed.
Others have not. Calvary Cemetery is listed as 99% photographed. The Sutton and
Harvard Cemeteries had fewer that a fourth of the graves photographed. I’ve
been concentrating on the Sutton Cemetery and over 60% have pictures uploaded
as I write this.
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| View of the North Section of the Sutton Cemetery. The grave of Leonard Hanson, World War II casualty is in the foreground, one of many veterans honored in our cemeteries. |
This
is still a young project. There are some cemeteries yet to be added, mostly
small ones. The directory for the Saron Lutheran Cemetery described two early
homestead family plots, neither appeared in the database. The Percival Family
Plot is familiar to some. It is marked by a gravestone just a few feet off the
south shoulder of Highway 6 west of Sutton. Five members of the Percival family
are listed on the stone.
The
Plumbly Family Plot is a few miles southwest of Verona on the Charles Plumbly
farm. Two adults and two children were buried in unmarked graves at the
northwest corner of the farmstead. No trace of the farmstead remains but based
on the “little dot” on the 1886 plat maps I took a photo of the site of this
“cemetery” for the findagrave.com database.
The
web site has a small staff which does such things as review new cemeteries to
approve them before allowing them to be posted – both of mine passed their
review. The website seems to be well run. There have been a few capacity issues
in the few months I’ve been working with the site but no interruption has
lasted more than several minutes.
The
founder, Jim Tipton, began this project with an interest in famous graves. That
interest has become a major feature of the site with many cemeteries listing
their famous and near-famous burials. There is a section listing the most
popular searches in the prior hour. Elvis Aaron Presley makes that list most of
the time. As I write this, Timothy McVeigh was high on the list as was Gilda
Radnerr, Claude Debussy’s daughter(?), and director Ted Post who had just died.
My
“fun” photo request occurred within the first weeks of my activity when several
requests were posted for the Aurora Cemetery including three for Hutsell family
members, relatives of my wife. I was going to Grand Island so took the list
along. Someone had requested a photo of the grave of Clarence Mitchell. I’d
never heard of him but I can now tell several stories about him.
Clarence
Mitchell was raised near Franklin, Nebraska in 1891. He dropped out of high
school to try his hand, his left arm actually, in pitching starting with the
Class D Red Cloud team. He managed to play in the major leagues for 19 years
before returning to Nebraska where he continued to play minor league ball until
he was 49 years old.
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| The Clarence Mitchell grave in the Aurora Cemetery, a popular grave for fans of early 20th Century baseball. |
Mitchell
had two claims to fame. He was a spit-ball pitcher and when that pitch was
outlawed, seventeen pitchers were grandfathered – they could continue to throw
the banned pitch until retirement. Clarence Mitchell was the only “grandfathered,
left-handed spit-ball pitcher.”
His
second claim to fame occurred in the 1920 World Series when Mitchell entered
the game as a reliever for Brooklyn against Cleveland. His batting won him this
claim. Nebraskan Clarence Mitchell hit into the only unassisted triple play in
World Series history. Not only that, but he hit into a double play his next
at-bat.
After
his career was over, Mitchell ran a tavern in Aurora. One of his advertising
items was a key chain in the shape of a small baseball bat with an ad for the
tavern on one side and an inscription on the other that read, “Beat this
Record. Two times at Bat, Result Five Outs in Brooklyn-Cleveland World Series,
1920.”
The
fellow who made the Clarence Mitchell Photo Request has a “Virtual Cemetery” of
Major League Baseball Players of the spit-ball era. Members of findagrave.com
have a variety of grave collections in their virtual cemeteries.
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| Action photo of Franklin, Nebraska native and early spit-ball pitcher in the major leagues. |
Cemeteries
can provide a unique insight into our history as we examine the stories
represented by these graves. A burial ground is a personal memorial, a family
memorial and a community memorial.
The
findagrave.com website goes a long way towards re-establishing the continuity
with the family and the community past that is lost when we separate ourselves
from the location where our ancestors lived and died. And there is a good
feeling when you can fulfill a request for a grave photograph and a few minutes
receive an email from an appreciative relative who just saw grandma’s grave for
the first time.
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