Surprises Never End When Doing Genealogy

Thursday, September 27th, 2018     by Debra DuPree Williams     Start the Conversation

By Debra DuPree Williiams @DDuPreeWilliams
By now, most of you know that I write cozy mysteries. If you aren’t familiar with cozies, they are a sub-genre of the mystery family. In a cozy, there is an amateur sleuth and there is no graphic showing of the murder. The murder takes place off-stage and there are no yukky things, in other words, no graphic murder is described, as it is happening, or after the fact.

The cozy I’ve written takes a page from my own search for my great-grandmother’s (our Daddy’s grandmother) grave. My sister and I have looked for her final resting place for over twenty years . . . to no avail. She isn’t buried by her first husband, my great-grandfather, nor is she buried next to her second husband. Indeed, no one in my family even spoke of a second husband. Ever.

  
Truth is Stranger than Fiction

And this is my point. Sometimes life is more complicated than the stories we make up. Another point is, I wouldn’t have written this story while my father or any of his siblings were still alive. After all, this is their grandmother I’m talking about. Even though I write fiction, my story is loosely based on actual events.

When I included my great-grandmother’s story in my book, Grave Consequences, I chose to use poetic license and make her story fit the one I had created in my mind. Don’t get me wrong. Great-Grandma’s story isn’t that bad, but it did cause the family to never speak of it. It is a story that my sister and I uncovered during the years we searched for her missing grave and for any and all records associated with her. These days, people wouldn’t bat an eye at the things we learned. Back in the late 1800s into the early 1900s, it was scandalous.

A New Discovery

And this leads me to a revelation that came my way last night. When Sis and I were just girls, she was probably ten or eleven and I would have been three or four, our mother and some of her siblings took us to the cemetery in which our grandfather on Mama’s side is buried. At that time, an old, rusty iron fence ran around the perimeter of the graveyard. There was a big oak tree standing mere feet from Grandpa’s grave.

His grave was a simple mound of Alabama red clay and there was no marker. Near him, one at his side and one at his feet, crossways, were two more such graves. For years we thought that these were the graves of two of Grandpa’s sons from his first marriage. Recent searches have told us that is not the case as it concerns one of those sons. We found evidence of his burial elsewhere. But the mystery remained. Who were the inhabitants of those two graves? Now, let me stop and interject that when Grandpa died back in 1931, this was a country graveyard, located out in the middle of nowhere. There were many unmarked graves there. Now, it is surrounded by the local high school, the little church, and a few homes in a subdivision.

Truth Revealed?

This past week, thanks to Ancestry, I was able to communicate with a cousin who says she knows who is in those two unmarked graves near Grandpa. She says one is his first wife, and the other is Grandpa’s grandfather, Sis’s and my great-great Grandpa.

While hearing this is extremely exciting to us, you need to understand that there is no proof that those graves belong to those two persons. Old cemeteries have only been mapped by the names appearing on the headstones in recent years. This wasn’t done back in those days. And many people were so poor, they couldn’t afford a permanent marker. Maybe they had a wooden marker bearing their names at one point, but if they did, they were gone before Sis and I visited the site all those years ago.

Never too Late
I want you to know that it is never too late to make discoveries, even when you think you may have found all the proofs or evidence you will ever find. After twenty years of searching for all of our missing ancestors, we may have discovered the final resting place of not just one person, but that of two. It took modern communication methods to bring us together with this cousin.

Never give up the search. If you haven’t had a DNA test, let me urge you to do so. There are many good ones out there. If you don’t know which to use, feel free to contact me and I will gladly discuss this with you. Some are better for learning certain things than others. And, if you are on Ancestry or any of the other ancestral information sites, consider sharing your knowledge with others who reach out to you. By all means, don’t make non-sourced info public.

How is your genealogy research going? Have you made surprising discoveries? Share that with us.

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