Twenty Years of Searching!

 

Death Announcement for Joseph Baker

My search began innocently enough 20 years ago during a visit to Greenwood Cemetery on a research mission for my 2nd great grandfather John Henry Baker. As I visited John's wife's grave, Blanche McKee Baker, I noticed another grave a dozen feet away with the name Joseph Baker on it. I took a picture that day not knowing if we were related or not.

It would be several years before I determined that we were indeed related and that Joseph Baker was in fact my 3rd great grandfather and the father of John Henry Baker. It would take me nearly another decade to discover that Joseph Baker was actually born Joseph Chicken and changed his name for reasons unknown to Baker after his discharge from the Civil War. 

I have written about all this before HERE.

Since that time, I have gone on to discover his father who I have written about HERE.

Picture of Joseph Baker's tombstone I took all those years ago

Despite getting past the brick wall he presented genealogically and tracing him and his parents and grandparents back to Durham, England, I have never known anything about his death which occurred at the ripe old age of 35. In old posts, since removed and archived from this blog, I have speculated many times over many posts about what might have happened to him, including discovering a few other Joseph Bakers that met unfortunate ends. All I knew was the year 1882 which was etched upon the tombstone which didn't narrow down things and I was unable to locate any articles pertaining to him in regional newspapers... until now. 

Joseph and Baker and Chicken are all fairly common words and doing searches with various combinations of those words and abbreviated names results in thousands of results across a wide swath of area. I have spent hours combing through those looking for that needle in a haystack. But as I was writing up my research notes of Joseph Chicken Baker, I decided to do one more search and I expanded the year to a year before and a year after 1882. I don't recall if I have ever done that or perhaps if the last time I did, the above newspaper hadn't yet been digitized. But I found the above article dated 4 Apr 1883, a year later than the year etched on the tombstone.

But I have proof that he was in the area that the article appeared because his youngest daughter was born in 1881 in that area. She was also his fifth child. I also know that Joseph Chicken Baker was around 35 years of age. Everything fits except for the date etched on the tombstone.

My theory?

Well it isn't the first tombstone I have found with the years wrong, the worst being his father Joseph Chicken Sr. whose tombstone says 1893 though he died in 1903, the article proving this in the link above. As we know, only those we leave behind after death are the ones who give the information to those taking care of our final arrangements. My theory is that the first stone wasn't as permanent, perhaps made of wood and by the time a replacement more permanent stone was created, years had passed and dates were fuzzy. I once found a tombstone, made of granite when all period stones of the time were made from softer marble and in worse shape. Recently I found a newspaper article relating the daughter had replaced the original stones thirty years after their death. It does happen.

But being cautious, I still would like to dot all my 'i's' and cross all my 't's'. If you noticed, that article actually appeared in a Waterloo, Iowa newspaper, which is smashed right up against Cedar Falls, Iowa and the article references that it was taken from the Cedar Falls Gazette the Friday before. That means that there could be more to the story in the hometown paper since Joseph Chicken Baker lived for a period of time, died and was buried all in Cedar Falls. Unfortunately, none of the online repositories contain the Cedar Falls Gazette for the years 1883. Most carry earlier year or later year editions of it but are missing the editions from 1880 to 1885 or so. I don't know why that is but plan to do some digging.

But at least if I never find anything more, I can rest a bit easier having answered a question (99% sure anyway) I asked nearly 20 years ago and have been searching for an answer ever since. After all these years of pondering various accidental deaths to murder, it turned out to be heart disease. My guess was that he probably had an undiagnosed heart defect. I'll never know if I'm right on that guess.