Ancestry/Genealogy
Related: About this forumCemetery records
Ok, I'm trying to find out where my paternal ggrandfather and mother are buried. They aren't in the cemetery that one of their sons is buried in. This is the state of Washington. I can't even find death records for them, although there's an online database in WA. Any tips?
Little Star
(17,055 posts)shanti
(21,716 posts)I've even added records
Little Star
(17,055 posts)all I could remember was the town I thought he was buried in. My mom was the only living child & she had Alzheimers. So I looked on line for all the cemeteries in that town and started calling them one by one. I did find out which one he was buried in that way.
I don't know what else you can do if you don't know the town. Here's wishing you luck in your search!
GentryDixon
(3,010 posts)You can contact the funeral home to see if they have records.
Other resources:
Biiliongraves,com
http://wagenweb.org/ by county may have cemetery transcriptions.
findagrave.com is a wonderful resource.
madinmaryland
(65,154 posts)able to get invaluable information from them. Often times they will have databases and may actually be able to do a look-up for you (either for free or a for a small donation).
BTW, what county are you looking for in WA? I found a volunteer that looked up and scanned several obituaries to me.
shanti
(21,716 posts)I originally thought it was Spokane county, but called the cemetery that I thought would be the most likely one and nada...
kickysnana
(3,908 posts)Years ago I got my Gr-grandfather's death certificate from Apr 1912
He had gotten significant intestinal damage from eating tinned bully beef in the Army in Florida while waiting to be shipped out to Puerto Rico in the Spanish American War 1898. His whole unit was affected and they had more casualties than the men who were fighting. Teddy Roosevelt campaigned on cleaning up the food industry, won and did that.
G-grandpa was sent to a veterans Fresh Air Camp in SD to avoid the harsh winters but died there about a year later. His mother had moved to Everett from Kansas. He did not appear on any of the published cemetery records for Mt Pleasant Cemetery, Seattle WA where he was buried according to his death certificate. G-Grandma came back to be with family in SD.
Years ago I traded some genealogy work for someone to go to that cemetery and what they found out was that the people from the Camp were considered indigent and buried in an unmarked section that was no longer maintained. She was upset and set about to do something about it, find the cemetery records and make them available and clean up that section and put a marker there.
People were buried on farms too. That G-grandmother's also died about 1911 on a Farm probably in Pierce Co ND according to the 1910 census and was buried on the farm. She died of "black measles" but even with online research I was not able to pinpoint what that might have been. It was finally mentioned on Dr Quinn Medicine Woman that that was the term they used to use for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. No death certificate was filed in ND according to a volunteer researcher but perhaps there was a spelling error or she was buried under her previous married name. He would only search one name.
Then there was Grandma Rosalie who was born out of wedlock in Holland but finally was legitimized with a generous donation to the local MN church in 1919. To do that her marker and church records just say she is just Mrs DeRyder so as not to tie her to her birth record (not the common spelling of our name) and her death certificate was also under that last name and for some reason did not show up on soundex matches when I first started looking. She died in an asylum of some kind, from family history I would guess from dementia, it is hitting many in my Dad's family as they hit 80. I think at that time those death records were sealed from the public along with some others and did not get in the old indexes.
Serendipity sometimes plays a role if you network with others looking for the same people. I linked up with a researcher who had married a Finland exchange student and moved there and we both knew about the second marriage for the Vet above's father, but we did not know about each others 1st and 3rd marriage. It opened up a whole other line of inquiry. That family had very, very common names.
shanti
(21,716 posts)You brought up a bunch of info that I was unaware of. Do death certificates always indicate the burial location?
Sherman A1
(38,958 posts)but, Death Certificates are a good place to start. Here in Missouri we have them available online after 50 years through the State Archives, I have had some luck finding a few things along the way.
Jenoch
(7,720 posts)your great-grandparents died? If it is after 1940 or so, they would be listed under the Social Security Death Index. I don't really know how to access that index. It appears the easiest way is to pay to become a member of a genealogy website.
We recently found two graves after many years searching. My grandmother had her first two babies die in infancy in the 1920s. There was a mention of these babies from time to time over the years, but nothing specific. We thought they were twins. We found old cemetery cards among grandma's things, but there was a name with no address. Do you know how many St. Mary's Cemetery's there are?
We checked out sever and then found the right one. The graves were unmarked but we finally located them. We are guessing we're the first family members there since the last burial in 1925. We're in the process of ordering two grave stones, one for the baby girl and one for the baby boy. They were born in and died in May/June of 1924 and 1925. I think the only thing that made my grandmother get through that experience is that she had 3 young step-children to care for. She must have thought about those babies every day. She did have a 'mental breakdown' as they used to call it, in the 1950s. She died on her 86th birthday with her youngest son (my dad) at her side.