Family History stories: Finding history in cemeteries
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- The first day we met, strangers felt like family as they explored family graves on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in June of 2013.
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- A spruce lies across the road in the Salt Lake Cemetery August of 2013.
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- Biological grandfather’s grave at Fort Douglas Cemetery in Salt Lake City in November of 2024.
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- Biological grandfather’s grave at Fort Douglas Cemetery in Salt Lake City in November of 2024.
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- Dianne Whitelock Miller with her grandchildren at the grave of her grandfather John Albert Whitelock.
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- Dianne Miller and Amy Moore discovered the graves of Dianne’s great grandparents on a trip to Wilmington, Delaware, in June of 2013.
Many readers from Northern Utah and Utah Valley responded to an invitation to share their favorite family history stories and experiences. Here is one of those stories:
Cemeteries are one of my favorite places to visit — it’s hard to beat a cemetery for family history discoveries. My mother (Dianne Whitelock Miller of Alpine, UT) and I have been to family cemeteries from Maryland to Delaware to Pennsylvania — even to Norway — collecting information to stitch our family’s story together. Our 2013 trip to Maryland’s Eastern Shore had united previous strangers who discovered on Facebook a shared passion for researching our Whitelock family.
In August 2013, having just completed that trip, I felt compelled to find the final resting spot of my mother’s grandfather, John Albert Whitelock (1852-1938), to thank him for keeping a personal family record which had sparked my interest in researching his family. We’d found his parent’s graves far away in Delaware after much searching, but I had never found his grave
so close by in the Salt Lake Cemetery.
With the express purpose of finding his grave, I drove by “Park Platt” just north of the maintenance building, parked, and suddenly … that purpose inexplicably left me. I decided to drive further on to visit other family plots instead, driving right to them although it had been years. I then circled back to my original parking spot, only to find a wind-felled spruce in the very spot my car had vacated.
After my brother and I did DNA tests, we discovered a 2nd cousin whose information finally helped us pinpoint the identity of our paternal grandmother. Seeing her photo for the first time was surreal for us! It wasn’t long until another DNA match gave us the name of our paternal grandfather. More photos, more stories, and a lifetime of questions finally had answers.
That year, my sister invited our new-found family members to attend an annual event we’d been attending for years — the Volkstrauertag German Day of Remembrance — at Fort Douglas Cemetery in Salt Lake City. What a surprise it was to have our aunts show us the final resting place of our common ancestor. Astonishingly, we’d been gathering as a family all those previous years at the foot of our biological grandfather’s grave.
Amy Burton Moore