Searching for State Trooper Ben F. McEvoy’s headstone has become a mission and I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge!
On Friday, Trooper Kelly came into the Historical Society and Marianne had a stack of information for her. We had located the obituaries for his family, including his two children, the newspaper article about his accident and various census records. We kept looking for various things when she was there and decided we’d go the the cemetery the next day. Kelly wasn’t able to, but Marianne was game.
On Saturday we went back to the Cemetery, sans Trooper Kelly, to look for that elusive headstone. Jim had his slim iron bar and he and Marianne probed a foot apart for the entire site. Three different times we thought we had found something and started shoveling. They were all false alarms.
With the second dig we encountered pieces of what appeared to be a broken headstone and a rusty metal hinge of some sort, and at one point we actually dug down about 3 feet, but were afraid to go further because we just weren’t sure exactly what we’d find. . . . . The picture shows Jim, shovel in hand, Marianne next to the prober and replacing the dirt, making sure the clumps of sod are covering our dig. We left the site exactly as we found it ~ well, maybe a little better! The model A is in the background.
Why go in the Model A? Well, it is the same era of the one that hit Cpl. McEvoy and Jim thought it would be cool to drive it! Evidently others thought the same thing, since we got a lot of honks, waves and thumbs up!
Final results of Saturday’s venture? Zip! No flat headstone, nothing that would even suggest another headstone was in the site.
Back to the drawing board!
This is my grandfather, I have been searching for a long time to find his gravesite—-where is it ??