The significance of a date

So I wrote yesterday about the question of where Mary Howard, whose remains occupy the oldest marked grave in Lucas County, had been buried before her reburial in the Chariton Cemetery. That post was entitled, "The puzzles of Lucas County's oldest marked grave."

Mary's family was the source of the story that she had been buried in the cemetery once located on the hilltop just west of Chariton's square where Columbus Elementary School is located. I worried that they might have been mistaken and that her grave might have been located originally at Douglass Pioneer Cemetery instead.

So I took myself up to the city clerk's office yesterday and the staff very kindly helped me check the Chariton Cemetery record books. Keep in mind that any cemetery records prior to 1890 or thereabouts were destroyed and what we have now contain recreations of those early records based, I suspect, on tombstone readings and memory when the current records were commenced.

There are two sets of these --- one lists burials in chronological order after the recreation of earliest records was completed and assigns a number to each burial; the other, keyed to those numbers, takes you to records that contain schematic representations of each lot with burial locations noted, sort of.

So I looked up the two adjacent lots where Mary now is buried --- as are two Bentley infants who died in the early 1860s and whose small tombstones obviously were moved from a former location to the current Chariton Cemetery, too. These lots are in the names of two of Mary's children --- John A.J. Bentley and his wife, Annie (Scott) and Cyrus Scott.

Although burial records for those early years do not exist, the deeds for the lots still do. And the deed for the Bentley lot is June 7, 1865. No one on either of the lots died during that year, so I think it's safe to conclude that the lots were purchased as a site for reburial --- of Mary and her two Bentley grandchildren.

We know that the current Chariton Cemetery was established in 1864 and graves at the Columbus site were moved there within the next couple of years, when the city's first big school building was constructed.

So I'm now content that the stories involving Mary's original burial place were accurate --- and that most likely she was the first to be buried at the Columbus site back in October of 1850, can finish up Mary Howard's cemetery tour script and move on with life.