FINDAGRAVE

Early in my research I read that graveyards can be a fine source of information for your family tree.
Because I knew so little about my father's family, I went back to the one document I had that might
be of some use. It was an old envelope that once held a deed to a cemetery plot at Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden, Massachusetts and on the front was the address of the plot. Most cemeteries are very cooperative, and for a small fee will send you particulars about a cemetery plot. What I got back from Holy Cross was a list of the Cook relatives buried there and the ages at death and internment dates. This gave me some great clues to go on to solve the mystery of Mary Feely, my great grandmother who seemed to vanish after the 1930 census. Eventually, when the 1940 census was released I found her in a rest home in Roxbury. From there it was a matter of sending for a death certificate and THAT gave me the names of two great-great grandparents in Ireland.

After I'd been doing this a while, I discovered FindaGrave. This is an effort to catalog online all the cemeteries and the folks buried there. If you have a city or better yet the name of a graveyard, a volunteer may have made an entry for your family member or may have taken a photograph of a gravestone. I found LOTS of my Rogers relatives this way. I joined and made a few entries of my own. Through the kindness of a member of the local historical society, I now have this photo for my Civil War ancestor, Winslow Brainard Rogers.

This is the memorial stone put up for him by the Civil War Veterans society. Another kind person went to the town hall and added a photo of the inscription there which includes his name.

You can also put in a photo request. The chances of getting to Malden anytime soon are slim so when I got to the Fitzgerald side of the tree I turned to this service. I knew my grandmother, grandfather and probably my great grandparents were also in Holy Cross. I put in a photo request and crossed my fingers... I had to go back and give the volunteer a little more information, but an 800 number call to Holy Cross gave up the Avenue and Plot. And now I have this memorial at FindaGrave.

Turns out that family finances were tight in 1896/97, so the grandparents and great grandparents are apparently under one stone. 

The blue links are a way to link one family member to another. So once you find one relation, you can often get information for an entire family. Be careful however, I have frequently found that these entries have differences in dates and other information from the official records. The cemetery often got information from family members and the FindaGrave entries are done by volunteers or family members as well. The happy news is  finding an entry with lots of biographical information: what he did for a living, who he married and in what order, military service, etc.

There is another somewhat newer site called BillionGraves. I haven't explored their site extensively, but it seems to work in very much the same way. Both places rely on volunteers to put up memorials and take photographs that have been requested. The polite thing to do would be to fill a request with a trip to the local cemetery. When it gets a little cooler, I'll go over to Hollywood Cemetery and see what I can do to pay it forward.

Eugene Harrington Rogers

Eugene Harrington Rogers
No download or reproduction without express permission

This is Eugene Harrington Rogers, son of Cassandria and brother of my great grandfather. I'm not really sure where this was taken, but perhaps this was his studio. I love the large artist's palette and his generous muttonchops. His life is not a great mystery; he was born in Holden, Massachusetts and lived most of his adult life in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. We're not sure when or if he had much formal training, but he married Mary Clark, opened a sign painting and advertising business at 304 1/2 Main Street in Fitchburg and lived on Arlington Street. They never had children and he died of a heart ailment at only 45 years old.

You may have noticed the large painting and recognized the "White Rock fairy". This is actually a very good copy of a painting called "Psyche" by Paul Thumann.  Thumann's original was exhibited to some great attention at the Chicago World Exhibition and I would assume White Rock bought the rights after that. Being an artist myself, I always wanted to know about Eugene. A small oil still life hung in our house all my childhood and larger pastel of a Newfoundland dog hung in my grandmother's house. These were the only existing works the family knew of. My cousin, an illustrator and art restorer in Manhatten, looked around on the internet from time to time and discovered that some of his work was registered. Tracing backwards she found that it was in the collection of the Fitchburg Historical Society. Sure enough, when I visited I found an enormous charcoal drawing called "Overlook Reservoir and Mt. Wachusett". It was a lovely landscape with which our family was quite familiar as it's a popular hiking spot in Fitchburg. A little more research by my cousin, my aunt and myself found a mural at the local Baptist church and another large charcoal landscape at the Westminster Historical Society. My cousin says they are all quite good. Now all three of us were intrigued....

One of the best sources of small town information for genealogists is digitized newspapers. Luckily the Fitchburg Sentinel has digitized much of its collection and Eugene showed up regularly between 1870 and 1900. The accounts of his sales are complementary and lively as is the story of his rivalry with another sign painter.  At this time he was doing landscapes, small still-lifes and animal portraits of hunting dogs in oil, pastel and charcoal. The Sentinel described his success this way "The sale increased so rapidly that the demand was far ahead of the supply within 10 days....Mr. Rogers' work went to the shores of the Pacific and throughout the West and South." Queries in the historical society newsletters have turned up no further clues. The signature on the work would be E.H. Rogers.
If you live in the West or South or even in New England and have a work with this signature, the family would love to hear from you.

Cassandria

Cassandria Hooper Harrington Rogers
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Through this blog, I'm hoping to connect to family members and widen the research I started almost four years ago on family genealogy. At the heart of the mystery is this lady, Cassandria Hooper Harrington Rogers Kauffman. Here's what I know: She always maintained on census records that she was born in Massachusetts-Worcester to be exact. Now whether that was the City of Worcester or Worcester County I have no idea. She first shows up boarding in a house in Holden on the 1850 census. She and a group of young, teen-aged girls were all boarding with this family and from what I know of Holden she would have been a mill girl. One of my lines of research may be to find the mill closest to the boarding house and see if anything in the way of records exists-doubtful. Stranger things have happened. Being a newbie genealogist I didn't think at once of exploring this couple to see if there was a family connection, but once it occurred to me I did and couldn't find a family link. The next record is a marriage record which records her birth date as 1833 and her parents as Joseph Harrington and Nancy. No last name. This is where the brick wall occurs. Worcester County was full of Harringtons. There was a very old and established Harrington family and several were named Joseph. But in no document or family history can I find one named Joseph married to Nancy (or Anna, Hannah or Agnes-which Nancy was sometimes a nickname for) and sadly, before 1850 the census only listed the male head of household. Cassandria married Winslow Brainard Rogers of Holden in 1851 and had two sons, Eugene and Edward. Edward was my great grandfather. Born during the Civil War, Edward never met or knew his father. Winslow Brainard died of smallpox in Vicksburg just after the siege and capture of the city. When I was a girl, we had letters from him to Cassandria. They were incredibly sad. Cassandria stayed in Holden and lived with various members of the Rogers family until her sons were almost grown. At that point she married William Kauffman. She died in 1904 in Orange, Massachusetts. There are two registries for her death-one in Fitchburg, where she is buried. The other was a card filled out by William Kauffman. On it he lists the birthplace of her parents as Connecticut. This disagrees with the 1880 census but agrees with the 1900 census. I've looked for siblings both male and female in the Worcester County area who have matching data, but with little success. I did find a Joseph Harrington Junior who died in Shrewsbury, and his death card reads Joseph and ? Green. So I pursued Joseph Harrington and Nancy Green which led me to Windham County, Connecticut in the Barbour Collection. There's a marriage record, but no way to know if these are the right people. Oh, and Hooper? A red herring I think. A nice lady at the New England Historic Genealogical Society spent part of one afternoon trying to help me and was as stumped as I am, but for one thing. She found a Cassandra Hooper Bliss who was a popular evangelist in New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts around that time. She suspects this great great grandmother was named in honor of her. The photo is a gem. I love the expression and the large cat on her lap. Recently people have commented that I look like her. I don't see it, but maybe so. She was a strong lady, that's for sure. And sure of herself as well. When I got the pension application from the National Archives her name is signed in a strong hand Cassandria H. H. Rogers. Something in her name was important to her. Maybe someday soon I'll know what that was.