Granite in My Blood: Tombstone Tuesday: Chesebrough and Evans Gravestone


Photo by Wayne Howland, 2012, used with permission

North Adams Family
Update!

Located about 104 miles away, is the Hillside Cemetery in North Adams, Massachusetts. Nestled in Berkshire County, the towns of Adams and North Adams are where my great grandfather, Charles Edward Stewart went to work as an accountant in the North Adams Gas Light Company and United Zylonite Company and met and married Ada Ann Evans, a local girl.

They married on 15 December, 1885.

If it wasn't for the tiny photographs of Ada's father and step-mother, in a closed case, I would not have found out that Charles Turner Evans, first married a woman whose name appeared to be Ann Janet, Angionette or Janette as it says on this gravestone. Her maiden surname was Chesebrough. They were from New York and that path sent me back to the Chesebrough family of Stonington, Connecticut. Larry Chesebro and the compiled genealogy of the Cheseboroughs helped a lot.

Janette died when Ada was less than a year old of consumption. Charles, a Civil War veteran, was a publisher, whose parents died before he enlisted in the War. In 1860 he is living in Adrian, Lewawee, Michigan with his mother's brother, Robert Aylesworth and his family. That branch of my family were practicing Quakers.

Charles served in Company H, 27th Massachusetts infantry and was discharged in July of 1865. The next year, he married Janette and had Ada in 1867. My mother showed me the portraits and I was entranced by the idea that someone whose name was Martha (like mine) but called Mattie was a step-mother. Ada was an only child like me.

It took me a lot of work to find her death record and to find out her maiden name was Davis. Charles left her a widow, (he died of hepatitis) and her death record told me where she was buried. So, I put a request into that cemetery at Find a Grave which was filled this weekend by the kind Wayne Howland of North Adams. I don't know if there are any more of these families buried there.

I still don't have a clear path of Evans back more generations. I think the father was Silvester or Sylvester Evans and his father was John Evans. There was an article in my family Bible about families named Evans but I can't connect it together correctly.

But, the fact remains. I now have a photograph of each of my three 2nd great grandfathers (who served in the Civil War) and a photo of their gravestones. It was a goal that I have now met.

Thanks, Wayne.