Tombstone Tuesday: M.E., Betty, and Infant Gresham

Weep not he is at rest.

At the time my husband and I started dating (for the second time, in January 2006), he was not sure where his paternal grandparents were buried. He knew his father was from Krum, which is just west of Denton, Texas. At the time, I was in library school, and doing a practicum with Kathy Strauss, Genealogy and Special Collections senior librarian at the Emily Fowler Central branch of the Denton Public Library.

Staff in this library department have developed indexes for birth, marriage, and death announcements in the local Denton Record-Chronicle newspaper for many years since 1909.  (As part of my practicum, I developed a user's guide for the indexes). Using these indexes, I was able to find the following articles on the microfilm of the newspaper's back issues:

Marvin/Mark Ellis Gresham burial notice, 10 February 1941, section 1, page 2, column 5

Betty Dickson Gresham burial notice, 21 November 1976, section A, page 2, column 4

I also found a surprise. My husband had an uncle who died as an infant. Notice in the weekly Krum column immediately below, there is a notice of the baby's birth (at the bottom of the left-hand column), and a few lines later, in the right-hand column, a notice of his death and burial in the Plainview cemetery:

"News from Krum" includes Gresham baby boy birth and death, 16 December 1916, section 1, page 5, column 6

Gresham baby boy birth and death, 11 December 1916, section 1, page 3, column 7

Next I checked the records for the Jackson cemetery in Krum, from a survey done in 1986, available in print in the library.  It had a helpful plat map.  It also had a surprise:  an indication that the baby was buried there and not at Plainview cemetery.  I found some clarification in the Cemeteries of Texas website, which indicated the baby had been "moved from P.V." (Plainview) in 1944.

On March 16, 2006, my husband and I drove up to Krum Jackson Cemetery and took the following photos, as well as the one at the beginning of this post, which shows the words engraved on the top of the baby's headstone.

The inscription on the left reads:

Inf. Son of
M.E. & Bettie Gresham

Born Dec. 9, 1916

Died Dec. 10, 1916

Engraved on the top of the stone is:

Weep not he is at rest.

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.