‘Tales from Pioneers & Soldiers Cemetery’ Archives
Julius Edward Johnson: His $140.00 Pocket Change remains a mystery
The $140 in the pocket of Julius Edward Johnson was more than enough to cover the cost of his burial. Graves sold for fewer than $10 and a plain box would not have cost even that much. His money bought him a place in the cemetery that is about as far from the Potters Field as it is possible to get. He is buried in Lot 3, Block 3, in the 12th grave from the north, near the 29th Street overpass over the Midtown Greenway. By Sue Hunter Weir It”'s hard to disappear these days””not impossible””but very difficult. That was not always the case. Before we had all of the various forms of identification that we have now, to say nothing of fingerprints and DNA, people were more or less who they said they were. People could pull up stakes, move to a new town and start over. They could also simply get lost””no one who knew them knew where they were when they died so they were buried as strangers. There are two men buried in the cemetery who were assigned names by [...]
The count of Union and Confederate Civil War Veterans remains challenging Part II: Two, New Confederate Veterans
General Index Cards of Isaac Breathed and Derusha Daffi During the American Civil War 1861-1864, every few weeks to every few months depending on the unit, usually at the company level, soldiers”' names were recorded on muster rolls. Beginning in the 1880s General Ainsworth”'s staff in the Department of the Army indexed these records originally to determine who was eligible for a pension. His staff wrote a card for every time a soldier”'s name appeared on a muster roll. When Ainsworth”'s staff finished the Compiled Military Service records, each soldier”'s file usually had many cards representing each time the soldier”'s name appeared on a muster roll. One type of card, the General Index Card listed the soldier”'s name, the soldier”'s rank at the time of enlistment from the first card and the date the soldier left the service with the soldier”'s final rank from the last card. These General Index cards form the basis for the [...]
The count of Union and Confederate Civil War Veterans remains challenging
Handwriting idiosyncrasies and paper folds led to misreading of application ordering a tombstone for James Parker as a Civil War Union Veteran when burial was of Jonas Parker who was not a Veteran. Part I: One Union Veteran Lost but Another Gained Two New Confederate Veterans By TIMOTHY McCALL, Guest Writer All right, so we didn”'t actually “lose” a Civil War Veteran--as it turns out, he never was one. Let me explain.  In the early 1930s -1940s, a concerted effort was made to identify and acquire markers for all of the Veterans buried in the cemetery. The effort was probably led by Albert Nelson, the cemetery”'s caretaker. Researching the cemetery”'s occupants”' history and genealogy in the early-mid 20th century must have been a herculean task considering that the availability of information was limited to printed material, telephone calls and writing letters to known genealogical sources, i.e., libraries and historical [...]
