Cool finds buried in the wall and yard

[Texasbadger]

Back in the late 80's I had a roommate who was a home builder and we shared a house that had been built in the 1960s.  One evening hes backing a trailer into the garage to unload some sheetrock and he manages to knock a hole in the sheetrock wall of the garage.  Inside the wall is a tombstone for a baby that was born and died the same day in 1890.  Kind of spooky, I tried for years to see if there was a local cemetary missing a stone but no luck, so we gave it a home in my parents garden.

[Oceans64]

Tex, that is (kinda) neat...  Many times graves were moved or the stones replaced with another type or a joint stone (like a sibling died later and was buried in the same place.  Did the baby have a name?  One really cool site is findagrave.com which is growing by leaps and bounds.  There are many, many, many cemeteries that have been inventoried and pics taken and more added daily. If this was from the 1890's that stone could have come from anywhere. 

Your parents garden is a great spot...

[KC]

Oceans....I found out about this site AFTER I walked/creeped/crawled through overgrown, moss laden cemetaries this summer.  Majority of the information/graves were on sites.  Not all sites are easy to find.....but it is a really neat program!

If you could remember the name of the baby....it would be to try and find!

[Texasbadger]

Weve been working that angle for a couple of years, my annual Christmas present to my mother is a subscription to Ancestry.com and shes gotten very good at tracking things down, last name was Norman, but no luck so far.  My great grandfathers grave is in Marshall Texas and its got C.S.A. engraved on the bottom edge, I know its just a matter of time before someone steals or destroys it.

[talesofthesevenseas]

Wow. What are the odds that the one wall you knock into had a gravestone in it? Probably a teenage prank they regretted later, and had no way to make amends so they hid the evidence. That's great that you keep looking for the grave. Very cool of you to continue the search. I'm sure this baby's parent's appreciate the effort. 

The whole concept of decimating graves is such an emotional one. I got a big dose of it recently during the research on my 3x great-grandfather who was killed on the steamer Jenny Lind. Turns out the graveyard he was first buried in in San Francisco was sandy, with shallow graves. People used to go in and harvest the soil around the bones to make soap. Freakin' horrible. I can totally relate to how Native American's feel when the graves of their ancestors are disturbed.

[KC]

texasbadger, I hope noone steals it.  What a honorable mention on the tombstone!!