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And tombstones LIE! LOL.
In my searching, I've found three ancestors who died within months of each other, and they shared the same tombstone. They died in 1899. But in 1900, they are alive and well in the census. Go figure.
I have another ancestor who, according to her tombstone, died in 1890, but the local 1891 paper mentioned that she was alive and suffering from breast cancer.
My own grandmother, who died many years before I was born, was buried without a tombstone. My Dad never knew this, as he was fighting in WWII when she died. He barely knew her, (LONG story,) and I only recently found out that she, and her second husband, had no tombstone. Four family members pooled some money, and we purchased a tombstone for them a few years ago, over 60+ years after their deaths. The cemetery had birth and death year info on my Grandmother, but I had to verify it before we ordered the tombstone. It turns out that my Grandmother was VERY fond of changing the year of her birth. I found every document my Grandmother had signed, which had her birth year on it. I had three different birth years for her, and it took a great deal of guessing to decide which year to put on the tombstone. The date I put on it does not match the cemetery info, which will certainly confuse genealogists to come. But I had to use the year that my Grandmother used the most often, and the one year she used with the births of her first three children. That was the time period of her life where it was most likely that other family members would have been around to make sure she put down the correct information. When I think of what we went through to get a 'most likely' birth year for my Grandmother, I can see how hard it has to have been to get the correct information on a tombstone back the age of 'word of mouth.' It's no wonder we find such confusing 'facts' in the past. Not that it doesn't make it any more frustrating for us, but at least I can laugh at it...sometimes. ;)
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