Friday, June 2, 2017

I thought you might like to hear about a fun experience that Mary Beard Gilliland and I shared a few weeks ago.  I arrived late to the memorial / decoration service and spoke with Mary just as she was leaving the cemetery in Steele.  She and Lee had found a rectangular tombstone lying flat on the ground near her Frazier relatives' graves and she was concerned that she was omitting placing flowers on a grave that she "should" have been remembering as she had promised to family members in the past.  When the stone was found, there was no engraving but Lee managed to flip it over and found that there was an inscription on the bottom side:  "Frank E. Whitney 1908."

We both wondered how long the stone had been in this position and who Mr. Frank might have been.  There were a couple of similar stones nearby, but I noted that the surnames weren't the same.  Later that day I looked in the records that I have on my computer and found that I did indeed have a record of this grave (thank you, Dad, for good record-keeping) and then I realized that in my database of  over 35,000 people connected with Steele I didn't have a single other person with the name Whitney.

That made me wonder who this person could be and why he was buried at the cemetery in Steele.  I decided to dig a little bit and see if I could figure it out.  The first thing I noticed was that there was only one date: 1908.  Usually when there's a stone with just the one date, I would guess that there is an infant under a year old buried there, or possibly a stillborn baby.  I decided to look for any marriages in St. Clair County with the name Whitney during the years just before 1908.  I only found a couple, which makes sense because the name Whitney is not common in our area.  This made the next few steps much easier.

One marriage that seemed promising was for Benjamin F. Whitney and Mary L. Womack on October 29, 1899.  It seemed possible that a couple would have a child 9 years after their marriage so I began to try to find out more about Benjamin and Mary.  I found that Benjamin was born in West Virginia and his wife, Mary, was born in Alabama.  His full name was Benjamin Frederick and her name was Mary Lou.  In the 1900 census they were living in West Virginia with his parents where he was a teacher.  I stopped to think about Mary Lou marrying in Alabama and moving such a far distance from her family in 1899-1900.  I also wondered why in the world Benjamin came to Alabama to start with.  I found that Benjamin's father was Silas Porter Whitney who was the leader for the Adventist Christian Church in West Virginia and a very well-known and well-educated man.

By 1910, Benjamin and Mary Lou were living in the Atlanta area where they had two sons, Fred (born about 1903) and Clarence (born about 1905).  They would later have two more children, Grady (born about 1911) and Thelma (born about 1914).  I noticed that there seemed to be a gap in the birth dates of the children where little Frank would fit, but I still couldn't figure out how he came to be buried in our cemetery and I didn't know how to be sure he was really the son of these Whitneys.

Finally, I decided to look into Mary Lou's family.  The story is getting long, so I'll leave out a few steps.  I came to the conclusion that Mary Lou must be the daughter of Thomas Womack and his wife, Cynthia Payne Womack.  I called Mary Gilliland to see if she happened to remember the names on the tombstones close to baby Frank.  She offered to check the cemetery and found that the two stones by Frank E. Whitney which looked very similar to his were none other than Thomas and Cynthia.  So finally, we have Frank E. Whitney placed and according to all the research that I've done he is the grandson of the Womacks that he is buried beside.

That may not mean much to you, but to me there is something very satisfying about assuring that baby Frank will be remembered for who he was.  Thanks, Mary, for an entertaining mystery -- and he's not related to the Fraziers so you're off the hook for decoration!