Saturday, June 30, 2012

Finding Another Lost Family Member

My husband and I made another trip to the cemetery yesterday to find a lost family member.  This was the wife of my husband's great uncle.  She was born on a small island off the Dalmatian Coast in 1878 and came to the United States in 1912 with her two daughters.  Her husband had arrived some years earlier. She died sometime before 1920, when in the census for that year her husband states he is a widower, but we did not know the date of her death, nor the circumstances.  In speaking with her living descendants, we were unable to gain any new information other than the possibility she had died in childbirth.

In a previous trip to the cemetery, we had been unable to find her grave.  Even the office staff was unable to find her name in the large pre-computer record books.  However, I decided to give it another try (sometimes one cemetery staff member is more adept than another) and this time the cemetery staff found her.  She was buried, they told us, with a baby.  She had died on the day of the baby's birth and the baby had died a few days later. The staff member gave us the location of the grave.

We went to the location they gave us and couldn't find the headstone.  We walked all over, but could not find it.  We began to think that there was no headstone, that perhaps the family had never purchased one, and we went back to the cemetery office.  They looked it up again and found that there was, indeed, a headstone, but it had only been purchased in 1991.  They also sent a staff member out to help us find the grave and it was not where they had originally directed us. 

This is eventually what we found:


The glare of the sun makes the image less clear than we would have liked, but if you look carefully, you can see the name "Dora Eterovich"  and the word "baby" below it. This appeared to confirm our theory that Dora died in childbirth.  And we were finally able to determine the year of her death.  We spent a few minutes at the grave, reflecting on the tragedy of dying at such a young age and leaving children behind.  Then we went on to find other family members and pay our respects.