Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Tombstone Tuesday - Samuel and Mary Ann Vaux

I haven't been writing Tombstone Tuesday posts because I ran out of my own gravestone photographs.  But I'm still actively going through my Record Matches on MyHeritage for Find A Grave and entering information and sources on a regular basis.

Every once in awhile, I go down my list of "missing ancestor burials" and occasionally I find a gem.  That happened last week and I was so happy, but I wanted to save it for Tombstone Tuesday.

I entered Samuel Vaux in the Find A Grave search fields and was rewarded by:


He is buried in the Pleasant Hill Cemetery in Concordia, Cloud County, Kansas.

I quickly checked to see if there were other Vaux entries there, and I found Samuel's wife, Mary Ann (Underhill) Vaux, also:


Not only do these memorials show a death date and a burial place, but they also provide a birth date.  I had none of those dates before I found these Find A Grave memorials.  I did not know their exact birth dates, their death dates, where they had died, or where they were buried.

My database is a work in progress, and I add event information when I find it.  I added the birth date, the death date and the burial place to my RootsMagic database using Find A Grave as the source.

I knew that my D.J. and Abbie (Vaux) Smith family resided in Concordia, Kansas from about 1878 to 1885, so this does not surprise me that they are buried in Concordia.  However, I had no information about Abbie's parents, Samuel and Mary Ann (Underhill) Vaux, after their enumeration with the Smith family in Blue Rapids, Marshall County, Kansas in the 1880 U.S. Census.  Now I know where they are buried, but I don't know where they died.

I can hear readers saying "But you don't know if the dates are correct!" and "Find A Grave is not a reliable source!"  They're right; I am not 100% positive that the dates are correct, but they are better than the approximate dates of "after 1880" or "about 1815," which is what I had before.  This is one Source, and it's a derivative source for the birth dates, and possibly the death dates and burial location.  There may be other sources.

For every event, it is recommended to find all of the available information for that event.  The Find A Grave memorials are finding aids that can be used to find more evidence.  I hope that the burial records above will lead me to:

*  A photograph of the gravestones, if they exist
*  A record from the cemetery showing the birth and death dates and locations, with an informant's name.
*  A newspaper article for one or both of their deaths
*  A county record for their deaths.
*  Probate records for one or both of them.  Since Mary died after Samuel, she may have a probate file also.

I just added all of these items to my to-do list in RootsMagic for Samuel and Mary (Underhill) Vaux:

*  Request a gravestone photograph on Find A Grave (haven't done that before, so I need to learn how to do it)
*  Contact the cemetery to see if there are records for the burials and if they can be provided to me.
*  Find out if there are death records in Kansas for this time period.  A visit to the FamilySearch Research Wiki or the LDS Kansas Research Guide should tell me.
*  Search for a newspaper article for one or both of them, which may be obtainable by searching newspaper archives in Concordia, unless I get lucky and find them in one of the online historical newspaper collections.
*   Look for probate records in Cloud County, Kansas when I visit the FHL in March.

I really appreciate the Find A Grave website, and the hard work and dedication of the contributors to the site.

I love the smell of "searching for elusive ancestors and their records" in the morning!!

What other records for these persons do my helpful readers suggest?

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/02/tombstone-tuesday-samuel-and-mary-ann.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

4 comments:

Marshall said...

Re: Request a photo

The button is right there "Request a photo".

You'll be asked to register, so FindAGrave knows how to get in touch with you, and then you're good to go.

It's really simple.

The Brigham City Fort said...

isn't findagrave.com a great site. I use it and have posted graves I have found. Have linked my Sherwood family back six generation in findagrave.com,

Regards,

Grant

http://thestephensherwoodletters.blogspot.com

Geolover said...

The sources of the dates for your two Vaux entries are not given. The birth and death dates are not necessarily from the gravestones. No one should assume that dates in the findagrave memorials are from the gravestones.

A huge number of findagrave entries are not actual gravestone readings. Sources might be death records, obituaries or published genealogies. Many items posted are just extracts from published purported cemetery readings which may have dates added from other sources. Many entries are just genealogical assertions that have nothing to do with documented burial in a specific place.

Cormac said...

>I can hear readers saying "But you don't know if the dates are correct!" and "Find A Grave is not a reliable source!"

You stoled my thunder!