VISITORS AND QUERIES
BY KAREN HANSEN
Valda Kennedy from Atlantic visited, looking for where her family first lived in the area. We helped her look for information on the names of FRANK, MEYER, MEREDITH and MILLS.
Judy HANSEN BREHMER from Council Bluffs used our resources to find and copy obituaries of her family members.
Pastor Gail Muckey from Walnut visited, searching for her great-grandfather William KELSEY from Oswego County, New York. We found his family in several censuses and also found the name of another person who had submitted information on William KELSEY to familysearch.org.
We are continuing to gather information on the Highway Gardens and found articles about the wind storm that destroyed the building.
Jim Hansen took photos of the ENGELMAN graves at the Avoca and Walnut cemeteries for Jack Engleman of Illinois.
Mary Ellen Woltmann of Walnut asked if anyone remembers when an airplane landed in the sports fields east of Walnut in the early 30’s. When it tried to take off, it became tangled in the telephone wires and remained on the ground there for several weeks.
Barb Butcher did research for Susan Grams of British Columbia, Canada. She was looking for two sets of great-great-grandparents possibly buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Walnut. She was able to find Edward LANIGAN and his brother Thomas, plus on the other side of her family Terrence & Mary WATERS and an infant son. A number of obituaries or death notices from The Walnut Bureau and also some baptismal and marriage records from St. Patrick’s Church were sent to Susan.
Barb and John Butcher also looked for LANIGAN graves at the Marne cemetery for a query on findagrave.com, but were unable to locate them.
Lanny and Paul Rolfe of Council Bluffs called. They had been in Walnut searching for the grave of Horace Alden ESTES, who was born in 1819 and died on 23 February 1884. A photo of the grave had been requested by Connie Boudens of San Diego, California on findagrave.com. We located information on Horace Estes on Family Search Ancestral File, but it only listed Iowa as the place of death. Nothing was found in any of the cemeteries in the Walnut area and we did not find his name on census records. I happened to ask Jim Carey at the Atlantic Library about Horace. He put his name onto the website iowawpagraves.org and immediately found that he is buried in Walnut Township, Polk County, Iowa at Jordan Cemetery and was a Civil War Veteran. We had suspected that it might be in one of the Walnut Townships, because we have found this to be true in previous queries. KH