#52 Ancestors Week 38 - "Unusual Source"

Relocated headstones @ Campbell Cemetery 📷's-Sally Stirling

One of my favourite parts of being a radio producer was researching anything and everything. In my former life I became really adept at sourcing and thinking outside of the box. Some call it "a nose for news". Genealogy research satisfies that personality trait that I no longer need for my work. I've used a number of traditionally unusual sources to find out what I want to know about ancestors. Google is your friend. You'd be surprised at the weird factoids that turn up with well worded google searches. For example, my great grandfather was a doctor. A search for him turned up a prescription for rosacea he came up with. We might take it to a pharmacy that compounds prescriptions and try it out!

Google books, too. All ancestors, whether notable people or not, have been reproducing for generations. I was happy to find newly discovered ancestors were subjects of books written  by their more immediate family. A search of a town in Scotland where generations of one branch of my tree were born turned up a website devoted to it's history. There is a treasure trove of info on Knapdale People's website. There are other sites like this, too. Family historians can join various One Name Study groups for surnames as well as locations.

 I have a LOT of Campbells in my maternal line. Two cases of a Campbell marrying a Campbell and of course, naming their children for their ancestors. I wrote about the headache inducing group here.

My maternal 1st cousin (once removed) Sally has contracted the ancestry bug. She is from the Campbell line as well. She has lived her whole life in Ridgetown, Ontario, Canada where some of them are buried. We are determined to get them sorted as a team, and are having a great time working on this project together. Here's where the "unusual source" happens. Over the weekend she headed over to the Campbell Cemetery. She realized an old friend of her brother lived across the street so she went and knocked on his door to see what he knew about the cemetery (pictured above). Unusual, but when you live in a small town and are from a big family, you know everyone! She found out that it used to be back in the bush. The family that lived there ploughed over the graves and the municipality had the headstones moved up by the road. So the bodies are somewhere back in the field now where the bush used to be. Pretty sad. He thinks this happened many years ago. Now that she brought it up, it's bugging him too so he is going to see what further info he can come up with. We at least have photos documenting whose bodies are somewhere beyond the cornfield! 👻 Not our direct line, but many have the exact same names, of course. Another thing that Sally found out from her old friend is that there were 8 Campbell lines who all emigrated together from Scotland around the same time. Good clue...thanks! Here are some more photos of the headstones. It seems sort of eerie to me (and a little disrespectful, eh?) that no one knows where the bodies are! 💀