Someone else knew he was there

Well now. I went to the Postville Cemetery yesterday. Lots of things happened, but this is the coolest:

Looks like Nun has a marker. Someone knew there was a burial here, but they didn't know who! This cross was not there 30+ years ago, when I was there last.

(And his sister, Janie has a "new stone," as well.)

Today I called the phone number listed for the Postville Cemetery, and talked to a family member associated with it. I told her I wanted to identify that "unknown" person. I gave my name, email address and phone, and told her why I think Nun H. Davis is "unknown." She was enthusiastic, and said she'd pass the info on to the now-caretaker of the information and we could go from there.

I'm excited! Yeah, such a nerd!

He's there, where he should be

I may have narrowed it down. I have been unable through conventional means to find anything that clearly tells where he is buried. I knew he SHOULD be buried at the Welsh cemetery where his parents and brother and more were already buried.

A Facebook user who had an account on Newspapers dot com found this clipping for me. We both belong to the county genealogical Facebook page, and I shared this "wall." And he posted this image for me. The kindness of strangers.

Look at the last item. Maggie learns of her brother's death and goes with a friend of the family to go get him.

The most important line is "The funeral was held Friday morning at Postville church."

It's not a rock solid statement, not clear as it could be, but I'm saying he was buried at the Postville cemetery, too. It's only a few yards away.

Irresponsible genealogy?

So I was finally informed correctly: When the funeral home who took care of my uncle Nun's funeral went out of business, another business took over their records, but the second business doesn't have anything but his death certificate.

I'm disappointed, because I've seen worksheets that funeral homes have, and they include a lot of information. But maybe the current funeral home didn't want 40 years of paperwork that wasn't theirs. I can see that. Now I'm stuck with "Burial: Humphrey," which can be any one of at least four and at most ten cemeteries.

The next step is to attend the genealogy conference this weekend, and hope for ideas.

Another step is to go look at the cemetery and see if Nun is etched into a headstone OR SOMETHING. This poor recording of events has left me all ... well ... frustrated.

At some point, since all the Humphrey cemeteries also don't have him and the Postville cemetery has him HAPHAZARDLY recorded, then I may just presume him buried there with the fam. It's what should have happened. Maybe it DID happen.

But presuming is not the genealogy way. (Think of it like "The Code of The West.") Not the responsible genealogy way, anyway, LOL.

He-man: Make fire!

To make a fire you need fuel, oxygen and ignition.

Mr. Butthead doesn't understand this. He had some trees taken down in January, and declined the offer to take the tree limbs away. So he's cutting them into rounds and piling them, but he piled up some of the smaller branches for a fire.

I dread him burning brush because he doesn't pay attention to the wind direction, and sometimes fills my house with smoke. He IS a Butthead, after all.

So I come home one day, and see one pile with a blackened branch. I look at this and I smile evilly. He's got green wood and he couldn't light it. I'm happy. Almost wishing I'd been here. Heh. And it looks like he gave up. It's quite possible to burn green brush, but it requires some finesse.

Over the weekend after his burn failure, he got a small open trailer and he's fixing up the hitch to attach to his golf cart. Now TinyTown's brush dump is full of mud and ruts and I doubt that a golf cart can navigate the dump, but if he takes it somewhere else, it's cool with me. If he's not burning, it's good.

I don't mind a competent, considerate burner. I know several. But the evidence shows that he's at the other end of the spectrum.

Anxiously awaiting

About 10 days ago, I burned the yarrow.

It was a nice day, no wind, and my yarrow is in two small areas in my front yard, about 1x2 ft and a 1x3 ft. ... It burned gooooood, and the little swirls and whirlwinds of fire and air and smoke, traveling upwind to where the fuel was, is fascinating to watch. The flames probably got 15 inches tall.
Yarrow is a native plant and impervious to a bittie surface fire like that. Gotta love native plants!

Since then I have been waiting for it to re-sprout, but these plants are smarter than I am, and they knew it was going to snow TWO MORE TIMES. *eyeroll* In the meantime, I look at them often. Waiting. Waiting.

I have a much larger patch to burn soon, but for that, I need my garden hose.

UPDATE: April 22nd the yarrow is sprouting!

Lunch shaming

I just learned that "lunch shaming" is a term. Although nowadays it has to do with children whose parents haven't paid for a lunch, the term immediately reminded me of my experience of junior high lunchroom.

I come from a family of tightwads, and I was never part of any social group at school, so when it came time for lunch, and I had a fried egg sandwich and everyone else had the too-expensive school lunch, it didn't bug me. *hand out, palm outward*  I had a book.

The ugly thing was that, although a. the other kids never ate their whole lunch, ever, b. the school administration decided that if you brought a sack lunch or no lunch, you had to sit at the corner table, while 120 other kids sat where they wanted and socialized ... as if we were c. going to eat the other kids lunches or some crap like that. 

It was a completely offensive and condescending rule, and a vivid demonstration of the class-consciousness of the town I lived in.

And the 120 other lunch-eaters swapped food and ignored food and threw it out in the end, like kids do.

In my life, it was just another way to be ostracized; I had developed the hide of a teenaged rhinocerous.

Harsh April

April has been a bitch

Normally February is a bitch, because I'm tired from all the cold weather all winter, and February is normally cold, and I have to wait through it to get to some warmer temps.

But this year, April is the bitch, with snow after unseasonal snow and cold after unseasonal cold. The trees are two months late budding out. My Korean lilac didn't know any better and pushed out buds in March that got frozen.

And for a month, I have been pumping water out of the root cellar. Now, for reasons too numerous to mention, I get to do it in snow. Gahhh.

... and Wahh!

Change of plans

I had plans for the weekend. It's April, so I had anticipated a warm weekend, in which I'd do a little garage saling, a little visiting, and tidy up at the cemetery. I had my things ready. That was a week ago, when I still had hope. *dramatic sigh*

About six days ago, I looked at the weather forecast, and had myself a minor snit, as snow was forecast, even that early, for this coming weekend. As the week went on, the forecast amount of snow decreased and increased, and then increased again from the original amount. The latest weatherliar estimate is 5-8 inches of snow. I do remember shoveling snow in April, in the 80s, but it's always been a couple inches. They are pretty sure we'll exceed that.

So I got groceries last night, and I'm getting the last of my treats tonight on the way home, and I'm staying in. For how long I stay in is somewhat up to the weather gods. 

So the bright spot:

Earlier this afternoon, I was looking out the side door, right by my boss's office, at the lawn-like area nearby. The wind was gusting up a fit, and last year's cottonwood leaves were fluttering all around. They are all putty brown, like the upper corner of this leaf (photo from the internet), crispy and still a little shiny in the light. They were swirling and tumbling and rolling. -- They looked right nice. 

Butthead

Due to the vagaries of life, the guy who moved in next door to me is a butthead. I mean that in the crabbiest form of the word. One of the prizewinning things he did was to whack a bunch of greenery he thought was weeds. He had no idea what was in there. I do. He thought I would thank him. Grrr.

I won't even call him by his name. I call him Mr. Butthead.

I could overlook the weed-whacking as a misbegotten good deed, but when he took my largish (think the size of a breadbox) landscape rocks that I brought home in an overloaded Dodge Colt from Sioux Falls, that was just theft. Sucker wasn't getting away with taking my rocks. Each time he took one, I left him a note and then he gave it back.

He gave them back. But he took them in the first place.

I'll add to his sins that he has butchered a screen of trees that slowed down the dust from the county road on the other side of him. It's hard to put your clothes on the line when the dust coats them.

So I plan on moving plants I value away from his whacking, chain-sawing ways. I have a clump of goldenrod, and a rhubarb plant that are both moving. Probably the horseradish, too, even though it has probably lived there for 60 or 80 years.

Because one of my living room windows opens out onto his barren-scape of a yard, I also plan on putting in a strip of sunflowers and shorter plants in a 1-foot by 70-foot strip between he and I.

Jerk.

Doing the obvious: reading the FAQ

I un-disappeared my dad this afternoon.

I have wrestled with the "disappearances" of people who are cremated. And sure, they are no longer on this plane, and sure, it makes sense for them to disappear, but in light of all the stones out there that get read by cemetery-walkers, grave-caretakers, and dog-exercisers, it just bothered me that cremated people seem to disappear from the records.

Even people without headstones are recorded. I could show you where my grandfather, Frank Davis is buried: it's just a patch of grass, but the records are in the sexton's office. -- This is an image I found of a different Frank.

Find-a-grave is a common tool to find where someone is buried, and to find more information about someone. When I found it, I looked up everyone in the lines I'm researching. You'd be surprised at the information that can be found. It's a wiki, so always bear that in mind.

Each time I looked at my grandparents' records, I could see three of the children connected to that record, and my dad was always missing. Because he doesn't have a grave. I assumed.

Today I did the unthinkable. I not only signed up (again) to Find-a-grave. (They have revamped the site and erased my previous registration.) But I read the FAQ. Oh my!

We can still enter people who don't have a burial site. Now dad is again (recorded as) one of the four children.

Moral of the story, and a common lesson told to genealogists: Never assume.

My uncle, the zombie

I recently found out (eventually) what happened to a great-aunt, and made super-sure via email that this was my aunt before embracing the details. Turns out that my tenacity with Mary was just a warm-up for trying to track down her brother, Nun. (For what it's worth, Nun is a real personal name, it's just archaic.)

This is a page from the family Bible, listing Nun's birth date. He appears in a few censuses and in the 1910 US Federal Census, but disappears after that. (One genealogist of my Davises on Ancestry dot com had him dying in Illinois, and I resisted that very strongly and saw no documents to prove it.) 

The censuses are the first resource to find people in history, and Nun had lived with his parents and then with his sister up to at least age 45, telling me that there was something different about him. 

In fact, I did find out what happened to hide Nun from the census. The reason he seemed to have disappeared from the census is that he was listed under Newton H. Davis at a hospital for the insane. Why is he suddenly Newton and not Nun? I don't really know. I was able to get papers from that institution, and they also refer to him as William. What the unholy crap was going on? I can see getting William from Nun, but I do wonder where "Newton" came from.

Speaking of unholy, for quite a number of months, while I didn't know what became of him, I did jokingly refer to him as "the undead," with jokes about zombies at every possible juncture. You can get too serious about this stuff.

Another hint on Nun's outcome, if you want to call it that, is that he shows up on a diagram of the cemetery where his parents, brother, Gomer, and sister, Janie, are all buried. He is not listed as being interred there, but is that just a clerical error? I'm trying to find out. I hope it's written *somewhere* that he's there with them.

His death certificate (as Newton) says he's buried at Humphrey, but not which cemetery. So far I have not found him at any of the four Humphrey cemeteries. And at a stretch, the cemetery where his family is might be considered rural Humphrey, but I don't know. I have letters out, asking for information. I could "find" him yet.

And why has it become important to find him? No one is descended from him. But for some reason it mattered to me, especially when the one researcher had him so far away from home. It bugged me. At least now I know he's buried closer to home.