My great-grandfather’s brother and his wife are buried together and have a joint tombstone in a rural Illinois cemetery. They were in their late seventies or early eighties when they died. I easily located his death certificate and other information on him, using the death date on his tombstone as a starting point.
I had some difficulty with the wife who had survived him.
The difficulty stopped when I located a newspaper reference their son where it referred to his “mother” with a different last name. She had married after her husband’s death. The tombstone does not mention this and it was not one of those things Grandma told me before she passed.
The marriage took place in the 1940s–just where I’m not certain. It easily could have been out of state in a location I had never thought to look.
Lessons and reminders:
- Never assume someone doesn’t have “one more marriage.”
- Don’t ignore any newspaper reference–even ones to seemingly innocuous social events.
- Tombstones don’t tell you everything.
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