ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” gave some of the details about my long personal history about the Bern Cemetery Company’s Historic Graveyard and the wooden marker that had been there all my life.

As a result of some publicity about the installation of a replacement wooden marker, Marvin P. Stamm Jr. emailed Patrick Donmoyer (Kutztown University’s Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center director) about a Find A Grave memorial saying that the wooden marker was for Civil War soldier—and Battle of Gettysburg survivor—William R. Stamm (1845–1888).

This put us into a flurry of renewed research activity about William R. Stamm to see if we could prove that he was indeed the deceased person whose grave the wood marked.

His obituary was front page news when he died (not an uncommon occurrence) and it confirmed that he was buried at Bern Church.

His widow’s pension file gave other details about his service and life.

And other Find A Grave listings showed his father Isaac Stamm (1814–1883) and mother Elizabeth Rischel Stamm (1819–1891) as being buried at Bern Church, although only Isaac currently has a tombstone.

I dug around into the private pastoral registers of ministers who served Bern Reformed in the at the time, and was able to verify that Elizabeth was buried at Bern, and since the Bern Cemetery Company’s new cemetery had come on line by then, I verified that she wasn’t actually buried there.

And while that new cemetery was divided up into family lots, the historic graveyard was more haphazard—burials were in rows, with several rows in use at any one time and usually graves reserved for the spouse of a married deceased person.

As happens too often in my genealogy life, it took coming full circle something I already knew about but had ignored to give the identity for which we were looking at least a tentative conclusion.

When I helped my mother and expert tombstone reader Laurel Miller compile a directory to the Bern historic graveyard some 30 years ago, in the back of the new cemetery record book was a semi-alphabetical listing titled [sic] “names of buriels in grave yard.”

And in that record was Isaac as expected, preceded by William (with the dates of the Gettysburg survivor), and followed by a listing for “Wooden Stone Died 1825”

My read on this is that at the time the “names of buriels” was compiled—likely by either longtime caretaker Louis Kirkhoff or his father Albert—there was a regular stone for the soldier, eliminating him as the person in the grave marked by wood, since there is a separate listing for it.

I do not take the “1825” date literally because it was likely misread; based on Elizabeth’s death in 1891 after her son and husband, I believe the wooden marker is her’s.