Can't Trust a Headstone
I’ve previously mentioned that I had only one blood relative at Oxford Cemetery – John Phillips. However it turns out there is another: David Bell.
David was the second cousin of my great-great-grandmother – a distant relationship, to be sure. Many people – families, and singles – left Ireland to seek a new life in the colonies. David was one of the latter; first coming to New Zealand in 1907 to work in coal mining at Westport, before switching careers and becoming a Canterbury farmer in partnership with other Irish relatives who emigrated after him.
Checking his newspaper obituary, his date of death seems straightforward:
However, a cemetery search for David Bell deaths in 1933 had not turned up anything – he didn’t show up in Oxford Cemetery as expected. Furthermore, I’d had trouble finding what happened to his widow Elizabeth Bell. With such a common surname, there’s too many death records to try and investigate.
But - what’s this headstone at Oxford Cemetery? It seems like it says 10 Aug 1932 but that’s a lot of lichen … so let’s double-check via the Waimakariri District Council cemeteries search:
The newspaper certainly isn’t wrong; there were death notices in multiple papers and we can verify that those papers didn’t all misprint the date. So, the headstone and cemetery record must both have the wrong year. How can this happen?
It turns out his widow is buried right next to him at Oxford Cemetery; her date of death is correct. Now, these two headstones look very similar. I’ll throw out a conjecture that perhaps Elizabeth neglected to erect a headstone for David, and perhaps the two headstones were put in together after her death. The cemetery record may have been searched to find David’s death date, but the original record may have been written unclearly, or an error introduced when typing up records at some intervening point.
Perhaps if any Oxford old timers are reading this, do you remember when David’s headstone went in? Leave a comment below or drop us an email.
Unfortunately for us genealogists, this isn’t an isolated phenomenon. For example:
- My Casey ancestors at Karoro Cemetery, Greymouth: Patrick is recorded as dying 1909 instead of 1908; and Thomas as dying 19 May instead of 12 May.
- Donatien Libeau’s headstone records his date of birth this time as 25 October 1861, when in fact it was 1860.
- Bessie (Sergison) Harrison, my great-grandmother’s half-sister, is etched in stone as dying in 1944 when she in fact made it to 1953.
Headstone epitaphs are often recalled from memory, and our memories are not infallible – even if it’s only 2 or 3 years after the fact. But even looking up the cemetery record doesn’t guarantee success, as we saw with David Bell. And clerical errors can be made by the engraver, as it seems must have happened in Bessie’s case.
That’s why in genealogy we have the three sources rule of thumb – i.e. to be completely sure of a fact, we’d like to have verification of a fact from three independent sources. For David Bell, we do have the newspaper death notices, the NZ BDM date of death, and his will, to confirm that 1933 was correct.
Check back next week when we’ll go a little deeper into David and Elizabeth’s lives.