Veterans Day

A ceremony honoring Veterans Day was held at Weston Cemetery this morning. The weather was cold and rainy, though the heavier rain did not arrive until the end of the ceremony. Fr. Don Davison gave the invocation and Mayor Wood gave the address.

 The attendance was lighter than usual for this event, but some people braved the cold and the rain.

 A few days ago I noticed a grave just across the road from where the Veterans Day gathering. Lieutenant John W Hudson died on February 2, 1945 in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

Last night the City Council had a short and mostly uneventful meeting. There were some motions to transfer money and to allow bond funding for some of the expenses for the new fire station. The gas tracker for November will be a two cents decrease. The city opened bids for gasoline, diesel, and tire repair, and then appointed a committee to review them and make recommendations. The city project director wants to establish a fee for reviewing requests for right-of-ways, and the Council approved his request to proceed with the city lawyer. The Chief of Police wants to replace a 2005 squad car and the Council set up a committee to make recommendations. The report from the committee that had been investigating the purchase of a new van for the electric department recommended a new 2015 GM Arcadia from Ed White Auto for $29,499. The Council approved.

The most interesting tidbit from the meeting is that Gutwein Seeds would like to expand its headquarters and is investigating the possibility of buying the old Admin Building (old Monnett School). There are many steps to be taken before that can happen. The Council approved moving forward.

The breakfasts for the RCHS sports teams that won sectionals will be held in the Council chambers on Thursday for the boys soccer and girls cross country and Friday morning for the football team. The aerial fire truck still has issues and is out of service until the problems are fixed. Trunk or Treat was deemed a success, though it would have worked better if the weather had not forced the event indoors. Finally, SJC is now the gas utilities biggest customer. It is heating using a temporary boiler while a permanent boiler is being installed. The switchover is planned for Dec 1.

Tales from the graveyard (updated)

The site findagrave.com is a database of graves throughout the United States and in many other parts of the world. It relies on crowdsourcing, that is, anyone who wants can contribute to the database. One result, unfortunately, is that the entries are of uneven quality and they often contain mistakes. However, when the entries are done carefully, they can contain a great deal of information to those who are trying to trace genealogies. (It is no accident that ancestry.com purchased findagrave.)

Looking through the many thousands of graves that have been recorded from Weston Cemetery for findagrave, one can find interesting bits of Rensselear history. For example, do you know the contribution that Abraham Leopold made to building Rensselaer?

Another pioneer business man in Rensselaer was Fritz William Bedford who had a general store and also a brick and tile manufacturing business. He died in 1915. A bit later in 1934 Benjamin Fendig, part of an important family of retailers died.  James Chapman, one of the organizers of the State Bank of Rensselaer, died in 1935. Just a year later was John Eger, an early grocer passed away.

Weston Cemetery also has graves of people who were prominent elsewhere but are for some reason buried here. For example, Samuel Foster, prominent in Madison Indiana, died here visiting his daughter and is buried in Rensselaer, not in Madison.

There are also stories of personal tragedy in the clippings attached to some of the graves. (Very few of the graves have anything attached to them. Less than one third have a picture of the grave marker.) There were car wrecks and airplane crashes, fires and electrical accidents.

The story of a woman who died undergoing a Caesarean is very sad, but I think a suicide is even sadder.

(For maps of Weston Cemetery and lists of people buried there, go here and click on the links at the bottom of the page.)

Update: The trees were in the Halloween mood today, putting on their ghost costumes.