Notes From Long Ago

 

Sometimes, the old trumps the new. In the case of reading nineteenth century headstones, I'd take a seventy-two year old transcription any day, so when I found just that, I sat down for a good read.

My question lately has been, "Where was Lidia Miller Gordon buried?" It was not with her Catholic husband and in-laws, apparently. When I discovered a number of Miller family members buried in a humble, farmland-based burial ground in Perry County's Reading Township, I thought I'd take a look around.

While Find A Grave has photos of many of the still-legible headstones in the Binkley Cemetery—like Lidia's possible brother, Jonathan Miller—the earliest burials have suffered the ravages of time, weather, and unkind trespassers. Fortunately, while I was looking online at FamilySearch.org/labs for any documents to resolve my research dilemma about Lidia, one search result produced a transcription of Binkley Cemetery headstones.

The beauty of this discovery was that, though they are mere typewritten transcriptions of the engraved headstones, they represent work done in 1953—a full seventy two years ago. Granted, 1953 is a long time after the first burials occurred in that cemetery in 1810, but it is still a vantage point much earlier than our present day.

I thought I'd take a look, line by line, page by page. Job number one was to keep an eye out for any mention of Lidia Miller Gordon, my mother-in-law's brick wall second great-grandmother. There were indeed a number of Millers recorded in that transcription, so now that I've created a Miller Network through my Ancestry ProTools, I'll be careful to add those entries into the appropriate places as I build out the Miller Network. Every bit of detail helps.

The FamilySearch entry continued for several pages. While organized alphabetically by surname, it appeared to cluster information pertaining to family plots. Thus, I could find the cluster for Jonathan Miller's family, and, just below that on the same page, a grouping for Michael Miller's family, another family which might be considered relatives to Lidia. In addition, there was a set of burials listed for the Dupler family, likely a connection to Jonathan Miller's wife Catherine, who was herself born a Dupler.

No matter how helpful it was to find this seventy two year old cemetery transcription, there was one detail missing: any sign of a burial for Lidia Miller, wife of William Gordon.