Andrew Jackson Millican, Lafayette, Oregon, Obituary

The following obituary is about Andrew Jackson Millican, from the McMinnville (Oregon) New Reporter, 13 September 1907, page 1, column 5
 

The Masonic Cemetery referenced can be found on this page (Link here)  on his parents' land claim - it is labeled the Lafayette Cemetery but is actually the Lafayette Masonic Cemetery #3 and can be found on Findagrave HERE. 

Lippert Weddings

Below are some marriage certificates and wedding photos of members of the Lippert Family.

 Myrtle Lippert (1890-1978) daughter of John Lippert and Elizabeth Lippert (Whose maiden name I know not) at their wedding around 1910 in (I believe) Banks, Washington County, Oregon

Another photo of their wedding day

 I have not yet ascertained Alfred and Lydia's relationship to John and Elizabeth Lippert yet if there is one, there is a George and Emma Lippert who lived in Roy, Washington County, Oregon around the same time as John and Elizabeth and I'm suspecting that John and George may have been brothers and emmigrated to the USA simultaneously but here is the marriage certificate for these two at any rate.

 Julia S. Pierce was Charles' (Charley's) (1883-1962) Second wife, his first wife, Bessie Taylor - whose maiden name was Robinson (as far as I can ascertain) and her first husband G.B. Taylor apparently died, leaving her a widow when she married Charles.  Bessie died in 1940 and is buried at Union Point Cemetery, Banks, Washington County, Oregon, and Charles married Julia in 1947, both wives are buried with him at Union Point Cemetery.

 

Lastly, Randolph Bland (1900-1974) and Ella M Long Lippert's marriage certificate.  They both moved down to California after the 1930's and managed to not show up on the censuses for a while though they were in Scott's Mills, Marion County, Oregon in the 1930 US Federal Census, and they both passed away according to the Social Security Death Index in Marina, Monterey County, California two years apart from each other.  I haven't as of this posting yet ascertained their burial locations.

James Thomas and Malvina Ann Millican Hembree Photograph

Headline: Coming to Oregon by Ox Teams in 1843, Five of 600 Pioneers of That Year Are in Yamhill County; Article Type: News/Opinion

Paper: Oregonian, published as Morning Oregonian; Date: 11-02-1913; Volume: XXXII; Issue: 44; Page: 8; Location: Portland, Oregon

Here's their headstone from the Masonic Cemetery, Lafayette, Yamhill, Oregon.

Interestingly he not only outlived his wife, he was considerably older than her too, by a stretch on either side!

Michael David Millican's Funeral

SK2-USN (RET)  Michael David Millican, 14 May 1947 - 20 March 2013.  

Dad's funeral at Willamette National Cemetery, 10 May 2010. 

Gemeteries & Gravestone Genealogy Work

Cemeteries can be one of the best places to do genealogy work.

Why?  Because information is "carved in stone" and often you'll find relationships even by proximity in the cemetery that can provide hints and clues.

One of my favorite online cemetery resources is Find A Grave (www.findagrave.com - also on the sidebar of the webpage).  Find A Grave contains virtual memorials of individual graves, photos of headstones and family members, obituaries, timelines and even has family relationships linked to other cemeteries - a sort of virtual / tangible family tree if you will.  You can request photos of gravesites if they are missing, or add photos if you wish and even leave a virtual flower or message if you wish on the memorials online.  You can volunteer and respond to photo requests and go locate graves that are on Find A Grave and then upload them for other genealogists around the world so they can do their work and I've found this work very satisfying. You can create a free "account" or login/register and create a profile and connect with other genealogists through this work.

You can search cemeteries with it, but beware, not all cemeteries are in it, neither are all interments.  While I've had tremendous success with Find A Grave, sometimes I have to do my own work.

So how do you find where someone is buried in the first place?

Well, you can search Find A Grave for starters - provided you got the name and location right. 

If you know where in the world the person died, I've had tremendous success working through obituaries in the newspapers through the Genweb Obituaries as well as through the Oregonian Archives found at the Multnomah County Library Online here in Oregon (need a library card for it). Other times, I've just had to be persistent with Google until I "dug something up."

Obituaries are fantastic because they contain *so* much information in a narrative format including married names of daughters, occupations, places of birth, previous marriages, ,military service, emigrations and lastly - places of burial. 

Unmarked grave next to spouse

Even when you find a place of burial, not all graves are marked.  Oftentimes you'll find family members were poor and so they were interred without a headstone and the place recorded but otherwise, there's nothing there.  Sometimes stones get overgrown with grass and sink below the surface, other times they are vandalized or disintegrate due to ice/snow making them shatter and other times if the cemetery is anywhere near where flooding is a possibility, entire cemeteries can be moved/destroyed/buried by a flood (That's always interesting to work with).  Other times, the cemetery its self may be manually relocated with some loss of stones / documents in the process.

Sometimes I have found headstones by poking into the ground with my weed fork (See cleaning headstones) and then excavated and lifted them up to the surface and carefully re-placed them on top of the grave (make sure you follow etiquette when you do this - *don't* break a stone - *don't* leave a mess - *don't* interrupt or distract from a funeral or grieving visitors).

My recommendation is if you know where someone is buried and there's no marker, for documentation purposes, take a photo of the place anyways just so you know you got the photo and don't keep thinking you've never researched the spot.  An unmarked but known patch of grass can be meaningful as well to some people.  Or, if the spouse's (or other family member's) headstone is still standing and the person of interest's headstone is nowhere to be found, but geography of the cemetery indicates that they may have been buried next to them, take a photo of that gravestone with the space next to it.

abandoned cemetery

There are a few different types/conditions of cemeteries though.

There are abandoned cemeteries - their name aptly describing them.  Often on private land, or even government land, overgrown and forgotten, often undocumented, have fun with these.  I personally recommend saying a prayer when working with one of these because its about the only way to find your way around - and I have.

Untended cemeteries don't have a groundskeeper so to speak, they may be fenced off and occasionally mowed and be on private or government land, but they don't have an office or maintenance or sprinkler systems or anything, and may only (if you're lucky) have records in the form of an old forgotten book chained to some part of the cemetery - shot in the dark on these.  However, to visit these you might/might-not have to obtain permission from the land owner.  Be polite, do your research, follow etiquette and you should have no troubles with these. Usually I'm able to walk right into these without needing to ask permission.

Other cemeteries have groundskeepers and are constantly managing the land and have a records office and may even have hours when they are open or shut like Willamette National Cemetery in Portland.  Some may only allow flat headstones so they can just mow the place without having to go in between gravestones.

Some of the larger cemeteries may have records they allow you to search online, others like some Jewish Cemeteries may require you to have a membership to search interments.  Others may be on tribal lands and have their own special rules for access.  Others may not have any online records (hence the usefulness of Find A Grave et. al) and require you to go to the office during working hours, drop your names off and come back in two hours after they find them.  Sometimes, if the interment is a child and is recent, they will not disclose the grave location without immediate family permission.  I've not yet had any charge me to look up an interment. 

BONUS - some of the larger cemeteries not only have the files of the interments but will sometimes carry additional information related to the cause of death, death certificates, the funeral service and other info and will provide you with copies of them at your request.

Oftentimes families will purchase a large plot ahead of time to be buried at.  So you'll head off to a quadrant and may find one giant monolithic headstone where the names of family members are etched each time someone dies with smaller or headstones or none if they stack the coffins on top of each other in the ground.  I've not yet had family who have been wealthy enough to purchase a tomb complete with glass French Doors with everyone's coffins neatly stacked inside, though I've been to plenty of mausoleums in this work - both indoors and out. Mausoleums are nice because the photography is always easy as the sites don't weather as badly as gravestones do, though getting a photo of the final resting place can be challenging if the place is fifteen feet up in the air on the side of the wall.

Depending on the age of the cemetery (out west we generally don't go back beyond the 1830's - unlike back east or even in Europe) even if it is manned, some parts of the cemetery may not have been documented (or lost records in a fire/flood) and so they may not know where an interment is.  However again, if you know a spouse/family member, and they have a blank space next to the spouse, with a bit of prayer and consideration, sometimes you can make that leap of faith.  If you document it, document your leap-of-logic/deduction in your notes.

If you're going to go to the cemetery and have to work with office staff, be sensitive to and respect any differences in religion (I never bring mine up), be polite, ensure you go early enough to allow them time to help you out.  If you're planning on doing any photography, I recommend going early enough in the day that the light is good, and while you're there?  Photograph a few other headstones as well and create a memorial/ load them up into Find A Grave for someone else down the road.

I recommend, if possible, taking your children with you as it can be a great family outing.  However, ensure that children are socially appropriate to the setting in all instances (mine run around in the abandoned cemeteries or as long as nobody else is there and they don't step on the headstones and show respect to the place) and make sure your work doesn't detract from the setting or any events that may be taking place in the cemetery that day.

Don't forget to look at the backs of the stones as well for any information contained on them (if they are standing upright obviously)!

If you feel really motivated, compile a spreadsheet of graves and cemetery layout if the cemetery doesn't have records and you can submit this to Find A Grave for that cemetery or even publish it on a genealogy blog.

Lastly, one of the greatest assets again is that headstones often contain additional family relationships or even personal info (military service) on them so they can really be a great boon to your work!  Don't just look at the gravestone you came for, look at the graves around them - often you'll find graves of infants who died in between censuses that you've never found before who are part of your ancestry.  Actually, very often you'll find far more of these than you would expect.  Try to learn the history of the cemetery you're working in before you go as well.  Many of them have a history that is associated with certain areas of their layout that will provide clues into other aspects of your work, such as the influenza pandemic that hit Portland in the early 1900's with many of the flu victims being buried in a particular part of the cemetery just in order to keep up with the burials.

While working in cemeteries is one of the gravest works I do with genealogy, I also find it one of the most satisfying because I get to work with something tangible and know that my ancestors and their friends stood where I am standing and I know why they were there and when it happened, and it gives me a bit of time to reflect on the plan of salvation.

Enjoy your work.

Photographing & Working With Headstones

Generally, transcribing info in genealogy makes us prone to making errors and perpetuating them, or changing information over time like a modern game of "telephone" where each repetition of the message changes what was originally said until the original is lost.   This is why scanning and photography - especially of headstones - is so valuable.  We capture the original information that is present.

Headstones are particularly valuable because the amount of work and checking that goes into the information on them is generally a bit more extensive than other sources.

( IF you have the right person.  IF they have a headstone.  IF you know where they are buried. )

Sometimes headstones only contain nominal information (initials, "Baby Hollinger") but when combined with cemetery records, obituaries, death certificates and the likes, they provide tangible "proof" that is less susceptible to error than documents and are a valuable resource to genealogy.


A suggestion when you go to a cemetery.  GO PREPARED!

1.  Buy a 1 gallon weed-killer sprayer.  You can get them at Wal-Mart for about $10.  You want the kind that will pressurize.  Mark it "WATER ONLY.  FOR TOMBSTONE CLEANING", so you will not accidentally use it for fertilizer or other chemicals.

2. Stiff bristle brush, NYLON.  The same kind you would use to clean your carpet.

3.  Shaving cream.  Cheapest kind, without gels and colognes in it.

4.  Squeegee  The rubber kind.  You want it to be flexible not stiff plastic.

5.  4-5 gallons of water (milk jugs with the screw on caps work well).

6. Camera with batteries, spare batteries, film, spare film or empty memory chip.

7.  Garden hand shovel – sturdy – able to lift small buried headstones and grave markers or able to shovel dirt off the edges or cut back the sod that overgrows the headstones.

8.  Manual grass clippers (heck - bring a gas-powered weedwhacker if you want to but it can be a bit unwieldy and draw unwanted attention or interrupt funerals).  This is for trimming back grass from the edge of a headstone for photographing it.

9. Weed fork hand tool – used for probing for buried headstones that aren't visible anymore or finding the edges that you can't see anymore or....pulling up weeds!.   

10.  Small tarp or sheet of plastic if you don't want to kneel in the dirt.

11. Five gallon bucket for carrying everything in.

(Additionally, if you wish to go beyond simply scrubbing a wet headstone, there is D2 Headstone Cleaner which can clean and preserve a headstone over time.  Instructions on how to use it can be found HERE. )

Take a photo before you even begin doing any work on the headstone, and then take a photo after every individual step in the event that one stage may provide a better photo than a further stage.  I've had headstones that I obtained better photos of as they were originally, than compared to after I cleaned them off. 

Brush off any dirt or mud using your hand or a brush. If the tombstone looks like it might be hard to read, mist it with water.  This sometimes is the only thing needed to make the information readable on the camera.

If misting it with water doesn't look sufficient, squeeze a SMALL amount of shaving cream on either the tombstone on the back of the squeegee and spread it on the tombstone.  Using the back of the squeegee helps keep the shaving cream from piling up on the gravestone.  This can help you see what is engraved on the tombstone for photographing.

Take a picture! (Step 1 – get close.  Step 2 – get closer! Step 3 – get closer! Step 4 – take picture! Step 5 – step back)  Later on, download the picture and file it and label it so you can find it!


Photographing headstones with the sun shining right on them can diminish the usefulness of the photos depending on how the stone is carved.   Additionally, being partially shadowed by trees can make reading a stone difficult.

Depending on the arrangements you may want to wait a while and allow the light to change before taking a photo for documentation purposes. Sometimes you may just want to do it on a different day.  Keep your shadow off the stone if you can.


After taking the picture of the tombstone, the shaving cream must be COMPLETELY WASHED OFF.  It will take less water if you brush it a little with the brush and then use the sprayer to wash it off.

It is very important to not leave the shaving cream on the tombstone.  Over a very short time it will attract particles from the air that will damage the stone.  That is why the pressurized sprayer comes in handy.  If use jugs of water to wash it off, it could take several gallons.  By using the sprayer, you can clean 5-10 stones with only a gallon of water.  There is enough pressure to clean off the cream but not enough to hurt most stones.

Under NO circumstances do you use bleach, flour, corn meal or any kind of acid on the stone. 

.

Tillamook County Marriages - 1896-1900

I found a link to the OR Genweb project with all the marriages in Tillamook for the above listed years.

Of interest to me was the marriage of Martha A. Walling & Isaiah F. Gould (8 Feb 1896) with Martha being known as "Ma Gould" at least in my research on the topic, however this appears to be a result of her first initials "M.A." which can be seen on her headstone.

Thanks to someone who landed on my page dropping me a line (thank you!), I was provided the info for the divorce of Martha & Isaiah in 1902.

Also, I found the marriage of John M. Millican and Ida F. Walling, though I haven't found her grave yet, he is buried in the Multnomah Park Cemetery.

Civil Bend Cemetery, Winston, Douglas, Oregon - Internment List as of 11/11/2012

This is a link to the list of the internments in the Civil Bend Cemetery in Winston, Douglas, Oregon - I used it to find the McCracken & Agee's buried there, namely Earl Agee and Mabel Frances McCracken and Cornelius Dale McCracken, Mabel's father.
http://files.usgwarchives.net/or/douglas/cemeteries/civil-bend.txt