Allen Norcross’s gravestone

I happened to be at home today, instead of at work, when I received a phone call from Nanci, who had seen my pages about Allen Norcross at my Black Hawk Slept Here web site . She is a descendant. I always get a kick out of meeting descendants of the people in the Black Hawk Slept Here story, whether online or otherwise, and enjoyed comparing notes with her.

I’ve been thinking of installing some forum software on my Black Hawk Slept Here site where people can exchange genealogy notes and other information, but haven’t done so yet. I told her I’d post a photo of the gravestone here at The Spokesrider. (She lives far away and has not yet visited the gravesite.) The inscription contains a piece of information that I thought was significant, and it seems she does, too.

This photo is a version one of that I already posted here. The gravestone is shown inside the red oval. This cemetery was the starting point for a bike ride I did last July 2. We had spent the morning in the library in Bluffton, where among other things, I found that the local genealogy people had compiled a directory to the location of gravestones in this cemetery north of Murray. I also found a news item saying that the large sum of money Mr. Norcross had been thought to have accumulated, had been found in one of his outbuildings. He had lived in this area at the time of the Black Hawk war, had gone away for safety during the war, then had come back. Later he had gone to Texas with his family, but still later came back to Indiana where he lived a solitary life until he died.

After getting a bite to eat, Myra and I drove to this cemetery where I looked again for his grave, this time finding it with the help of that information from the library. Then I took off on an afternoon ride, while she went to learn about the Amish people who live along the Wabash River in Adams County.

My Spokesrider entries about Allen Norcross are here and here.

It was hard to get a good photo of the gravestone, because it was off in the shade at the west edge of the cemetery. Here it is in the foreground.

The background of this photo is very washed out, but if one clicks on it to get the larger version, it’s easier to read the inscription. The part that interested me was the words, “Rest Father.” It suggested to me that some of his children had come from Texas to put up this stone marker and perhaps claim their substantial inheritance. If his children had made a journey to the old homeplace, it also explained how the local history writers might have known what they did about the family in Texas.

I suppose there are other possible explanations for that part. But when I read these old county histories, in which sources are rarely cited, I often try to think about who possibly could have provided the information. Sometimes my hunches lead to other interesting investigations.