Reason WAITS was my great great great grandfather James G WAITS’ brother, and the source of the letters that I quoted a couple of weeks ago in this post.
For some reason, Reason has been on my radar a lot this week so I thought it would be fitting to post these photos of his very unusual and cool headstone that a www.findagrave.com volunteer posted. She said that someone before her chalked the monument, which can damage the headstone and make it deteriorate faster. Not a good idea, in my book.
Actually, doing anything to a headstone is frowned upon in the genealogy and cemetery world. There’s an ongoing debate over what’s acceptable and what’s not. For more on that, check out this blog post from Dick Eastman.
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2005/05/tombstones_and_.html
And the follow up post:
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2005/05/how_not_to_read.html
But for now, let’s get back to today’s Tombstone!
Reason Waits
b: 19 Nov 1819 in Brown County, Ohio
m: 19 Nov 1844 to Susan SIPES (1825-1855) in Ray, Missouri
m: 31 Oct 1858 to Melissa Jane CLEMMONS (1839-1927) in Atchinson, Missouri
d: 23 Feb 1892 in Fairfax, Atchinson County, Missouri
He had 4 children with Susan, and 7 children with Melissa.
I really don’t know a lot about him at this point, but I get the feeling this will change sometime in the very near future. I found a cousin on Ancestry.com that is one of his descendants, and she just emailed me this morning to say that she found a ton of WAITS photos and documents in a family scrapbook that she hasn’t looked at in a while. So I scanned the copies of Reason’s letters and she is going to copy what she has and send it to me. So this story will break wide open in the next few weeks!
Inscription:
“The pains of death are past
Labor and sorrow cease
And life’s long warfare closed at last
His soul is found in peace”
how could he have been born & marired in the same year?
Thanks for pointing that out, Brenda! It’s fixed now. =)