Week 42 Lost

“As family historians, we deal with a lot of things that are lost or on the verge of it… memories, records, people… This week, you could explore something that has been lost or the experience of losing something. Feel free to post your links and stories in the comments.” prompt from Amy Johnson Crow for Week 42.

So many choices to write about for this prompt with burned down courthouses, burned down military records, flooding resulting in lost photos, losing touch with family branches who move. I decided to write about lost tombstones in cemeteries. A few years ago my husband and I took a trip through parts of Iowa visiting living relatives and visiting the dead in memorium. I wanted photos of their gravesites with tombstones to add to my records and I wanted to honor their memories.

The first one we stopped at was Linwood Park Cemetery in Boone, Iowa. I was very impressed with their online maps and how well they keep the cemetery. It is a large cemetery so the online mapping was super helpful. I found all I was looking for plus some I hadn’t realized were buried in this cemetery. I learned to always look at the surrounding stones because my relatives were often buried next to other distant relatives. My great great grandfather is buried next to one of his grandchildren. My aunt and uncle are buried nearby and next to them is another grandchild of my great great grandfather.

We also stopped at the history museum in Boone on this trip. Well worth a stop if you have the time.

The Sacred Heart Cemetery in Boone is where my parents and my dad’s parents are buried. My grandparents had twins who died at birth and they are also buried in this cemetery. This is another well kept cemetery.

There are many other small cemeteries in and around Boone. I have relatives buried in several of them, so I guess we will make another trip sometime in the future.

The next stop was Swan Cemetery. It was more or less out in the middle of nowhere on a gravel road. It was very close to where my Slater family lived. Thomas Slater (1802-1875) was my third great grandfather. He is buried in Swan Cemetery. It isn’t very large, they had this nice listing so we knew we were at the right place.

Here is Thomas Slater’s stone, it is starting to get covered in mildew or whatever it is that grows on these old stones. I wish we had the time to clean these but felt good that we actually made the trip to find all of the relatives. I know the cleaning has to be done carefully so as not to damage the stone. You can find directions here if you are interested in cleaning the stones of your relatives. His stone is in a very nice location.

Thomas’ wife Mary (Mark) Slater (1805-1880) moved to live with her daughter after the death of her husband so she is buried in Abingdon Cemetery. This was another small cemetery. I found an index online. Mary is listed and it doesn’t say she doesn’t have a stone but we were unable to find her stone. There was no map available for this cemetery that I could find, I contacted several local and county sources but never heard back from any of them. It may be because of the pandemic my question was lost in the chaos of people not working, so I will try again now as many places have reopened.

We walked the entire cemetery several times. Many of the stones in this cemetery are crumbled and or wiped clean of any information that was engraved originally so it is difficult to tell who is buried where. This is where the information lost comes into play on this post. It made me a little sad to see this destruction.

We found Mary’s daughter, who was also named Mary (1836-1915) buried with her husband (William P. Johnson) and their daughter, Clara I. (Johnson) McCreery. I think Clara had six children and we saw quite a few McCreery’s in the cemetery so these may have been Clara’s children.

It is another beautiful, peaceful cemetery and was well groomed. Without some type of map and many unreadable stones it is difficult to know where your ancestors might be buried.

The final stop on that trip was in Tipton, Iowa at St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery. We picked up some helpers along the way and added three sisters and two brother in laws to the group combing the cemetery for our relatives. It is a small very well groomed, very well maintained cemetery. Finding all of our Siepmann relatives here was easy with all of the help.

I wasn’t able to find information online but I contacted the church associated with the cemetery and they gave me the phone number of the man who maintains the grounds and keeps the records. He was such a sweet man. He told me I shouldn’t have any problem finding the stones I was looking for but if I did just give him a call and he would come out and help us! Such commitment to helping is commendable.

We found even more Siepmann’s than I had expected here. Frederick William Siepmann (1860-1920) and Catherine (White) Siepmann (1860-1950), my great grandparents are buried in this cemetery. At least four of their children are buried here as well as Catherine’s mother Margaret (Dalton) White (1825-1924). There are a number of Lang’s buried in this cemetery. F.W. Siepmann’s mother was a Lang so this is reminding me that I was planning to see if any of them might be connected.

This ends our tour around a few of Iowa’s Cemeteries. Finding the cemeteries out in the country had us spotting out of the way cemeteries everywhere we went for awhile. It’s amazing to me how many tiny cemeteries there are all over the country. I hope when you go looking you are able to find clean, easy to read stones where ever you go.