Where's Mary Jane?

Problem: find where Mary Jane Dukes-Aurand is buried.

Sources: obituary, online obituary database, cemetery transcriptions, known genealogy of the family

When I visited my hometown of Findlay, OH in January 2006 I looked up most of my direct ancestors’ gravesites. One that I was not able to find was Mary Jane Dukes-Aurand. Here’s how the story goes:

During the preparation for my trip, I used the online obituary database of the Findlay Hancock County Public Library to makes lists of all the obituaries I wanted to look-up and all the cemeteries I needed to visit. Mary Jane was somewhat elusive in this regard. I had trouble finding her in the obituary data base. I checked under both her married and maiden names, as well as Mary Jane and Minnie (I knew from my grandmother telling me about her that her nickname was Minnie). I found an obituary for a Mrs. Henry Aurand which seemed promising, since this was Mary Jane’s husband’s name. However, this ended up being Henry's second wife, not Mary Jane. In the course of checking the obituary index I copied down "near hits" that I got in case I needed to reference them later. It wasn't until I was in Findlay that week that I found her obituary in the database under Mary J. Aurand. Unfortunately, all it told me was that she died of consumption near Benton Ridge; it gave no family or burial information.

Since I now knew that she died near Benton Ridge, it made sense that she would probably be buried somewhere nearby. I looked through the cemetery transcription books that I thought might be applicable. I checked Dukes Cemetery first, since that seemed an obvious choice given that her maiden name was Dukes. There was no listing for a Mary Jane (or Minnie) Aurand, but there was a Mary Jane Dukes listed with a date of death of 1883. The date of death given seemed much earlier than what I was expecting; Mary Jane’s husband died in 1925, so I was looking for a date similar to that. Jane is a pretty common first name, and a Dukes buried in Dukes Cemetery pretty-much told me nothing, so I decided this wasn’t the Mary Jane Dukes I was looking for. Moreover, since she had been married for a number of years and had two children with her husband Henry, I was expecting her to be buried under her married name of Aurand, not her maiden name of Dukes. I concluded that this Mary Jane Dukes who died in 1883 was not my great-great grandmother but some other “cousin” with the same name.

My visit to Findlay ended and I left without finding where Mary Jane was buried. After I got back home and started working with all the data I’d collected over the course of my visit I came back to the problem of Mary Jane’s burial. I had an unconfirmed date of birth of 1849 and an obituary dated 03 Jan 1884. The obituary was printed in a weekly paper which reported that she died “Thursday.” Thursday happened to be the day the paper came out, so I needed to determine if she died that day or the week previous (27 Dec 1883). But what was I going to check these two dates against to determine which one was accurate? I ended up looking back over the “near hits” I’d found in the obituary database, and there it was, staring me in the face: Mary Jane Dukes, 27 Dec 1883, Dukes Cemetery. I'd listed it as a near hit!

Key to the puzzle: Mary Jane’s obituary uses her married name of Aurand but her headstone is inscribed with her maiden name Dukes.

My resulting epiphany consisted of the following realizations. The obituary data base contains two sources of information: dates of obituaries published in local newspapers and headstone transcriptions from county cemeteries. If the person has an obituary, their headstone information usually isn’t listed in the database. Mary Jane had two listings in the database: an obituary under her married name Aurand and a headstone inscription under her maiden name of Dukes. These entries don’t reference each other because the obituary (under Aurand) gives no burial information and the headstone inscription (under Dukes) gives no marriage information. The key piece of information one has to know to solve this whole riddle is that Mary Jane was buried under her maiden name. So, at the end of the day, Mary Jane was hiding in plain sight: in Dukes Cemetery, right where I’d expected to find her!

Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, once I found her obituary I had a date of death within one week of accuracy. Why I didn't take this date and compare it to the data in the obituary database is a mystery to me. As mentioned above, when I saw 1884 listed as her date of death in the cemetery transcription book it struck me as being too early to be her. Her husband died in 1925, therefore she should have died somewhere around the same time; a very erroneous assumption on my part. Combine this with my lack of faith in the unconfirmed birth date of 1849 and I looked right at the solution without seeing it.

Two lessons learned: first, don’t assume which name—married or maiden—will be used for a woman’s obituary or headstone inscription. Second, just because it’s the obvious place to look doesn’t mean it’s the wrong place. Rule it out based on facts, not because it’s “too easy” to be true.

Final mystery: given that Mary Jane had been married for just over 13 years to Henry Aurand and given birth to two daughters, why was she buried under her maiden name? One can understand that her family may have insisted on burying her in the family plot, but why under her maiden name that she hadn’t used for 13 years? Once a Dukes always a Dukes? Perhaps.

I have seen many instances of women who died young and were married for far less time than Mary Jane was who were buried under their married name. Many, in fact, have completely lost their own identity in death and been given a headstone inscribed with their husband’s name, i.e. “Mrs. John Doe.” Others have preserved at least their first name and received “Jane, wife of John Doe” as a final inscription. Mary Jane’s situation illustrates that even when someone is buried under the name they were given at birth, it doesn’t guarantee an easy find 120 years later.

Genealogical Epiphany

Every family has a different sense of who their “relatives” are. Some families embrace nearly every far flung in-law as a “cousin” while other families are more particular about who they allow to claim a branch of their family tree. I had an interest in genealogy and family history from a young age and can recall asking my grandparents who their parents were, what their names were, where they were buried, etc. My grandparents’ surnames are Otto, Huffman, Creighton and McDowell, and I grew up with a firm sense of how these branches attached to our family tree. Our family is fairly small, even back through my grandparents’ generation, so we weren’t one of those families who had “cousins” to spare. I can recall that whenever we’d encounter a local with the surname of Otto or Huffman we’d declare that they mustn’t be any relative of ours or we’d know who they were. This sentiment wasn’t born out of any sense of genetic superiority, but more perhaps from a naiveté of how prolific our ancestors had been and how long their descendants remained in our home county.

During my high school years I completing a family tree chart that included all 16 of my great-great grandparents. Even after this project I tended to think of our family tree as having four main branches, one for each of my grandparents. Ancestors beyond these were, for me, lost in the ancestral mist, very far removed from the familiar branches of my tree I was used to hearing about.

This changed last year when my Mom asked me to go through an old chest of family things she got from my granddad's house after he passed away. Inside this trunk of old family papers and pictures was a genealogist's dream--a family history written by my great grandmother Huffman. Additionally, there was a picture of my 3rd great grandparents Thomas. It struck me that my great grandmother Huffman had labeled this picture "our grandfather John Thomas." Obviously any grandparents of hers would be direct ancestors of mine, but these great-great-great grandparents were far, far away from the branches of my family tree I was familiar with.

Think of your ancestors as the trunk of the family tree and yourself as a branch further on up. You’re familiar with all the nearby branches you can see: parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. You might have some sense of branches that are further away from you, closer to the trunk of the tree: great-grandparents and great-great grandparents. Any branches further away than these are usually obscured from our sight by all the leaves and branches in between; we know that more distant branches, and ultimately the trunk, are there, but we never give it any thought. So, being out on a branch of the tree and looking down we lose our sense of where we came from.

Now consider our ancestors’ perspective (which will someday be our own as our descendants multiply and add branches to the tree). Looking up from the trunk, we may not be able to see every branch and twig of the tree. Seen or unseen though, we know that every branch of the tree emanates from us and is an extended part of us. Considering my ancestors’ perspective is what caused me to experience my genealogical epiphany: every direct ancestor is a grandparent even if they’re on a distant, unfamiliar branch further down the tree. Put another way, would you ever consider your great-grand children as not being “yours” simply because they’re a few generations down the line? Of course not, and the same holds true when we look back up the line at our great-grand parents. It’s often the case that we never get to meet our great-grandparents--let alone great-great grandparents--and this lack of a face-to-face, direct reference is what adds to the genealogical mist between us and them.

Another part of my epiphany was the recognition of our female ancestors’ equal place in our genealogy. Women usually change their surname when they marry, making their ancestors harder to find later on. But while the names might change, the blood never does. We’ve got just as much of our grandmother’s blood in us as we do our grandfather’s. And while we might consider that the blood “thins” as it gets mixed making its way down through the generations, your fourth great grandmother is just as much your ancestor as is her husband, your fourth great grandfather.

Again, this may seem obvious to some. But recall my point about surnames above: it’s a lot easier to trace a male’s ancestry than a female’s. Add to this the fact that our society is patrilineal, meaning that we trace our ancestry through our father's line (Jewish culture, on the other hand, is matrilineal because they trace their ancestry through their mother's line of descent).

We might have certain social, cultural or familial perspectives regarding our genealogy, but perspective doesn’t change our blood. Thanks to my genealogical epiphany I now consider my direct ancestors as grandparents in my direct bloodline and not as distant relatives whose importance has been washed away by the procession of generations or the changing of names.

A Trunk Full Of Dead Relatives

Every genealogist has a dream about finding the proverbial trunk in the attic that is chock full of genealogical treasures: photo albums, family Bibles, newspaper clippings, vital records, and so on. I can proudly say that I am one of the fortunate few who have, more or less, made such a discovery. Perhaps it’s more proper to say that my Mom made the discovery in the upstairs of my Grandad’s house after he passed away in 1991. She and my aunt sorted through it to some degree, then Mom took the trunk (more properly a metal footlocker) and put it in my old bedroom at her house for safe keeping.

I was back in Ohio for a week when my Grandpa Otto passed away in January 2005 when Mom asked if I’d help her go through some old family things. She hauled out the trunk and we proceeded to sift through its contents. The greatest gem of all was a handwritten family history which went back as far as my 4th great-grandfather Thomas. The second greatest gem was a labeled picture of my 3rd great-grandfather Thomas and his wife. Other treasures included my great-grandmother Creighton’s Bible (filled with obituaries of family members) and pictures of my great grandparents Huffman and Creighton. I made scans of the written family history and most of the family photos we found (nearly all of them unlabeled) to take back with me to Oregon.

As a teenager I had done some genealogical work. I took genealogy as a 4-H project one year, and my research had me thumbing through dusty ledgers at the county courthouse, hoping to find the names of great-grandparents’ parents and thus adding another generation to my family tree chart. To this day I still have my cryptic, chicken-scratched notes on high school notebook paper and the family tree chart which was the culmination of the 4-H project.

I drifted away from genealogy shortly thereafter, though my interest in family history never went away. Finding my great-grandmother Huffman’s handwritten family history of her Thomas ancestors re-whetted my desire to push back the murky veil of generations past and discover forgotten branches of my family tree. My research had never taken me as far back as these Thomases, nor the Wiseley line they married into. I had once again been bitten by the genealogy bug and I’ve been off and running ever since.

After I got back home to Oregon I looked over my old high school notes to re-familiarize myself with the branches of my family tree and how they all connected. Then I got some genealogy software and started filling in boxes with names and dates. I immediately noted that computers, genealogy software and the Internet were a much more efficient way of doing genealogy than paging through dusty ledgers and drawing tree charts with a ruler. But there could be no replacing these ledgers, nor a much faded picture labeled in pencil nor a family history, hand written on scraps of typing paper. Were it not for these primary sources there would be very little information to post on the Internet or enter into the genealogy software.

When my folks drove out from Ohio the following summer I asked them to bring the trunk with them since Mom didn’t really want it and I knew my research would lead me to sift through it again, many times, more carefully. When I talked to my Dad on the phone shortly before their departure from Ohio he told me that he’d loaded “the trunk of dead relatives” into the back of the pick-up truck. The trunk had been christened, and it was forevermore referred to by its new, colorful moniker.