Ancestry Saturday: Up The Hill Again

Downing Cemetery in Magnolia, Ohio is an interesting little place.  It got my attention again.

Last fall, I visited to try to find a great grand uncle who was a Revolutionary War patriot and an early settler of Stark County, my home county.  I found his stone in disarray.

I later found an early 1970's photo that showed what the stone used to look like.  It was a lesson in why to keep looking.  It also gave me a reason to want to go back.  So, I did.

My kids and I made a trek back when we were running early to a family gathering.

This trek back found that his daughter Drusilla's stone is, indeed, intact. 

I photographed the entire cemetery (it took less than 10 minutes) and loaded it up to Findagrave.com.  There are several unreadable stones, but all but three of the 25 stones in an earlier transcription have been photographically documented now.

Ancestry Saturday: A Lesson In Keep-On-Lookingness

 

I ventured up a big hill and on to private property to find a walled cemetery.  The gravestone for my fifth great grand uncle was to be there in Magnolia, Ohio in Stark County, yet no photo was online. 

 

Stark County is my native home county, and I was intrigued to find if a stone still existed for my relative for whom a predecessor town to Magnolia got its name in 1836--Downingville.

 

 

What I quickly found, though, was that the 191 years since the stone was placed had not served it well.  I could tell the death year was 1822. I could read 72 years as his age.  Nothing else of note was still there, including his name.

 

James Downing and his brother, John, my fifth great grandfather, served in the Revolutionary War.  If it weren't for the metal star commemorating his war service, I would not have been able to believe, with any certainty, that it was his grave I was photographing. 

 

Nonetheless, I was the first person to post a photo of his stone on FindaGrave.com to share it with the World.  I couldn't find a stone for his wife, Sarah Laughlin Downing despite a listing saying she was there.

 

As I would find out two months later, I wasn't the first person to take a photo, though.  Forty years earlier, in May 1972, researcher Edna Conrad snapped a couple of black and white photos and got them developed.  A relative of hers kindly put copies of the photos in an application for the First Families of Ohio lineage society of the Ohio Genealogical Society.

 

That's where I made a find I'll credit to keep-on-lookingness.  I found that member file, numbered 35 out of list that now stands over 4,000, during a recent visit to the OGS library. 

 

 

Albiet quite damaged, a much-more readable, and mostly-intact gravestone for James Downing was the find in the 1972 photo. 

Also in that 1972 photo was a stone for Sarah Laughlin Downing.  There in the back is the tall monument stone for their son James and his wife, Nancy too. 

The 1972 photo captured a portion of the stone for Drusilla Miller, the Downing's daughter and wife of the founder of Downingville.  Her stone isn't standing anymore so this might be the last such photo, portion or not.

Credit keep-on-lookingness again.