Whistling Through the Graveyard

Chapter 1 - Stumbling into the Battle of Jenkins' Ferry

I have been doing genealogy research seriously for the last nine years, and often I run across little oddities and strange coincidences. Because of my hobby of going to cemeteries and documenting dead people, I thought of the phrase "whistling through the graveyard" as a play on "whistling past the graveyard". The latter phrase actually has nothing to do with cemeteries; the most common interpretations of it are to stay cheerful under dire circumstances, to proceed with a task in spite of a potential hazard, or to enter into a situation blissfully ignorant of the consequences. Those all seem apropos to my life experiences, so I liked the idea of using it as a basis for my phrase.

In any event, "Whistling Through the Graveyard" is an attempt to document some of these oddities and coincidences. Some of them are just weird, some border on the supernatural, some are just odd historical footnotes. Whether any of it has any deeper meaning or significance I leave to the judgment of the reader.

I was at the Forest Lawn Glendale cemetery almost a month ago, an experience which is not unusual for me (I would go more often but sometimes it takes me months just to work through the marker photographs I have taken from one trip before I am ready to get more). I scraped Forest Lawn's entire grave listing website seven years ago and created my own database with it, and the data I gleaned from that experience has provided grist for the mill for much subsequent research.

There is a woman Forest Lawn has listed on their website named Alice Maurine Shelton. There is no death date listed on their website, which in most cases means the person died before 1935. They do list her burial location, which is the Victory section, Lot 348, Space 6. I had created a Find A Grave memorial for her years ago with some notes that I thought some of the information on the Forest Lawn website was wrong or garbled. (I don't bother updating any of the Find A Grave stuff anymore since they have fouled the site up so badly). In any event, I had flagged Alice's record for more research since I didn't know which information was correct and which wasn't.

I was in the Victory section on 28 July 2018 and I did successfully get a marker photo of Alice's marker, which cleared up some mysteries (she was born in 1899 and died in 1926). While I was there I got some other photos in the same area, and I also determined that another woman in the same area had no marker. This was Alta Mae Rush, who was in Lot 377, Space 3 of Victory.

I get obsessed about some of the people with no marker. In some cases the lack of a marker is by choice, people just don't feel the need for a marker. Upon which, I think of the line inscribed on Keats's tombstone, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water.".

But from the research I have done, it is clear to me that most people with no markers have none not because of choice, or plan, or desire. They have no marker because their families had no money for a marker in many cases. If a husband and father in his prime working years dropped dead suddenly and left behind a wife and children, in many cases the wife was more concerned about feeding the children and paying the rent or mortgage than she was about paying for a marker for her husband.

The flip side of that coin is when a wife and mother died, the husband could keep the family going financially but was utterly unprepared to take care of the children. That might lead to an experience of being completely overwhelmed when it came time to dealing with things like getting grave markers placed.

I know of one case where a daughter had not dealt with getting a marker for her mother a year and a half after the mother's death. To the best of my knowledge the issue was not financial; it may well have been lingering grief coupled with some other psychological issues. I'm happy to say with that one that I was able to help out by getting someone's attention and the mother now has a marker (a rare case where I have made a difference, and I have seen literally thousands of graves without markers).

Another thing I have seen is just a lack of preparation. In some cases the last one in a family to pass away, whether it was a parent who outlived their spouse and children, or a child who was never married or was divorced, ends up with no marker. They might have had the money to make the arrangements but if they didn't tell the cemetery what they wanted on the marker or paid for it in advance, there simply ended up being no marker.

In any event, I don't think most of these people wanted to be forgotten. There are some occasional bizarre circumstances where there is a particular reason someone has no marker. Supposedly there is a mobster who was buried in Forest Lawn in the 1920s with no marker and the cemetery put him into their records under an assumed name because they were afraid his enemies would dig up his grave and desecrate his remains. (When I come across that person again I'm going to research him). Then there are strange ones like "Factory Reject" (that's worth a whole article by itself, and maybe I'll write it one day).

So I like to sink my teeth into researching people with no marker. In some cases it's fairly trivial because they are buried next to spouses or children or siblings, and some of those are a slam dunk to research. In other cases they are not, the person was single or a young child and the rest of their family is buried elsewhere.

Alta Mae Rush was a cipher. I could not find her in the California death records and I could not find her in any census records. It looked like she probably died in the 1920s but there was no way to know for sure.

Even when you're a rocket scientist, sometimes you need to throw in the towel and get help. I cheated. I called up Forest Lawn and asked for the Glendale records office.

Some of the people who work there are absolutely brilliant, some are merely adequate. But all I have spoken to tried to be helpful, although some were more helpful than others. I was lucky this time, I got someone I have spoken to before who knows I'm not related to most of the people I call about, and who also knows I don't bother them in the records office unless it's a tough one to research. I rattled off Alta's name to him and her plot location and that she had no marker and no date on the website.

That was enough information for him to cut to the chase and he figured out the problem. Alta's surname was not Rush, it was Rusk. He gave me her interment date and age. I thanked him and then it was off to the races.

Once I had Alta's correct last name, I found her in the death records and the 1920 census. With that I had her husband and her children, and I found an existing family search record for her which had her maiden name (Lackey, although at least one set of marriage records garbled it as Lackery). While researching her, I ended up finding two records for her on the family search website and merged them together (a common experience when working in family search, although easy enough to fix).

Looking at Alta's family in the 1880 census, I ran into an annoyance. They were listed in Washington township in Rice County, Kansas. There's only one problem. In 1883 (and presumably 1880 when the census was taken) Rice County only had twelve townships. At some later date they were split into twenty townships. Washington township was split into East Washington township and West Washington township. At the time the census was taken there were no addresses connected with the families, so I really can't think of a way now to know whether the family was in what is now East Washington township or West Washington township.

Anyway, that's a minor detail, but it shows you how insane I am. (As if you couldn't tell from reading this article). Now, while I was trying to figure out that problem (which is for the meantime insoluble) I was looking at the Wikipedia article on Rice County, Kansas. There are two counties in the US named Rice, one in Kansas and one in Minnesota. The one in Minnesota is named for Henry Mower Rice, who represented Minnesota as a representative in congress while it was still a territory, and later a US senator after Minnesota achieved statehood.

Rice County, Kansas, is named for Brigadier General Samuel Allen Rice, who served in the Union Army during the US Civil War and was mortally wounded at the Battle of Jenkins' Ferry in Arkansas in 1864.

This is one of the reasons I love the internet, by the way, it's great how one thing leads to another, it's wonderful if you are an obsessive compulsive ADHD sufferer (although I'm really not ADHD, just OCD).

So I was looking at the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Jenkins' Ferry and I said to myself, "Wait a minute, I was just looking at this yesterday!". And indeed I had been.

I mentioned earlier that I had gotten a marker photo for Alice Maurine Shelton while I was wandering around the Victory section of Forest Lawn Glendale. I had researched her family just before I had sunk my teeth into finding out who Alta Mae Rush/Rusk was.

Alice Shelton's (maiden name Johnson) family ended up splitting into California branches and Texas branches. Her father died just a few months after she did in 1926 and is buried near her in the Victory section. In addition, her husband and two of her brothers are also buried in Forest Lawn Glendale, although in different sections than Victory. One brother, one sister and her mother are buried in the Texas panhandle (her mother moved back to Texas after helping to take care of Alice's children, and the one brother and sister never moved away from Texas).

Alice's sister Grace Viola Johnson McAvoy died in Texas in 1982 and is buried in Amarillo. The Texas death records show she died in Randall County, which is part of the Amarillo metro area and is just south of Potter County which Amarillo is part of. There is only one Randall County in the U.S, the one in Texas.

This is where it gets fun. Randall County is named for Colonel Horace Randal (they misspelled his name when the county was named and it has never been fixed). Here's the kicker. Horace Randal of the Confederate Army was mortally wounded during the battle of (drumroll please) ... Jenkins' Ferry in Arkansas in 1864.

Another high ranking Confederate officer was killed outright during the battle, Brigadier General William Read Scurry (he is buried in Austin, Texas). Scurry County, Texas, is named in his honor.

There is no personal connection between Alta Mae Lackey Rusk and Grace Viola Johnson McAvoy -- but there is a connection between them through an obscure civil war battle whose high ranking casualties posthumously lent their names to places both women lived in. The other connection is purely one of proximity -- Grace's father and sister are buried near Alta and her husband Isaac Newton Rusk, which is of course what led me to research both families at the same time.

I did a bit more reading on the Battle of Jenkins' Ferry while writing this article. It was part of the Red River Campaign which was an unsuccessful attempt by the Union to capture Shreveport, Louisiana, as well as parts of East Texas. I pride myself on my knowledge of Civil War history but I was blissfully unaware of this battle. The forces engaged were fairly large for the western theatre of the war (10,000 Union and 12,000 Confederate) but insignificant by the standards of the eastern theatre, where battles like Gettysburg had close to 200,000 combatants. Jenkins' Ferry is noted for the ferocity of the fighting, official casualty figures are misleading because Walker's Texas division's losses are unknown (Walker filed no report) and Union general Thayer also filed no report for his division. The best estimates later compiled are 700 casualties for the confederates and 1,000 for the union (killed, wounded, prisoners and MIA). Casualty percentages of 8% might not sound like much if you're an armchair general but if you were there it must have been a hellish experience.

In case you're wondering who actually won the battle, it was essentially a draw. The union forces successfully retreated so the confederates were able to claim a tactical victory. Because of the failure of the Red River Campaign General Sterling Price of the Confederacy (immortalized as a cat in the 1968 movie version of True Grit) was able to invade Missouri later that year and go all the way to the outskirts of Kansas City, but he was thrashed at the Battle of Westport and chased into Oklahoma after that. Atlanta was lost to Sherman's army the month before the Battle of Westport, and little or nothing of strategic import subsequently occurred in the western theatre of the war.


Sources:

Alice Johnson Shelton on Family Search Dot Org (registration required but free)
Alta Mae Lackey Rusk on Family Search Dot Org
Rice County, Kansas on Wikipedia (free to view but registration required to add or edit articles, free to register as well)
Grace Johnson McAvoy on Family Search Dot Org
Randall County, Texas on Wikipedia
Battle of Jenkins' Ferry on Wikipedia


Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - The Mobster With No Marker

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