[or-roots] Re: [GFO] Powell Grove Cemetery

[Eugene Melvin]

Hi Carroll, I do have both of their deaths certificates.  Both list a funeral home in the city where they died.  Neither death certificates mentions anything about relocating the body to Portland.  Same with the obituary I found in the Seattle Times for my Great Grand Father.  I have yet to find anything  in the Oakland Newspaper.  And nothing in the Oregonian.  Did not know about the Park rose newspaper.  Will follow up on that when I get home.

Also I have some information about some dairy farms and a military Fort locate east of Park rose.  Also a story about a tree that took eight men all day to take down because rail road tracks were being laid and this tree was in the way.  As I remember this story my Great Great Grand Father, Samuel Douglas Melvin,  was visiting from Maryland and was so impressed by the work of these men that he made an all day trip to Portland by horse and buggy to get a photographer to come out and take a picture.  (Wish I had this picture).  This story was relayed to me by my Great Uncle who was born in Rock way, Oregon.  (Now 182nd and Stark Street, Portland, Oregon)

Eugene Melvin
SW Portland, Oregon

----- Original Message ----- 
    From: CARROLLOUC at aol.com 
    To: or-roots at sosinet.sos.state.or.us 
    Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2004 2:09 PM
    Subject: Re: [or-roots] Re: [GFO] Powell Grove Cemetery


    Hi Eugene - This is quite a difficult one. if you have the death certificates from WA and CA they might help but would probably not tell you where they were buried. Obituaries? Have you searched for those? One might be in the place death for each and another in the Portland Oregonian or Journal. Also, Parkrose at that time had a small, local newspaper called the Parkrose Enterprise. They might be obtainable from the Knight Library in Eugene through an interlibrary loan.

    Parkrose was out of the city of Portland at that time and I don't recall that there were any mortuaries there. The closest ones I remember were the Colonial Mortuary in the Hollywood District (they handled my grandfather in 1947) and Gables Funeral Home in Montavilla. There may have been some closer but that would take research through the Polk City Directories of those years and I believe phone books were almost non-existant.  One of the local mortuaries would probably have received the bodies if they were shipped to Oregon.

    You are correct in your rememberance of the fuss about the cemetery being moved. 122nd curved off of Sandy on the west side of the cemetrey. It made a slight S curve and then straightened out to head south up the hill towards Halsey. Eventually the problem was reconciled and there is still a curve but with the additonal lanes going straight past the east side of the cemetery, leaving it stranded between the roads in a sort of pyramid shape. Ah, progress.  Some buildings were removed rather than moving the cemetery.

    I graduated from Parkrose High in 1947 and had lived in Parkrose from the summer of 1941 until I married and moved to Medford in 1949. Peior to that time we lived in Montavilla but had lived in Parkrose when I was very small and my grandparents had a dairy farm on 109th and Simpson.

    Carroll (Cooper) Summers
      Hi Carroll,  Living in SW Portland I have been out to this loving little cemetery many times.  

      I also found a letter by my grandfather in the Oregonian complaining about an attempt by the county to move this cemetery because it wanted to straighten out 122nd avenue (I believe). 

      Anyway I have been in contact with the current county administrators of this and the other 14 pioneer cemeteries and she has been very helpful i.e. the 70 pages I mentioned earlier.  But the problem I have incurred is apparently there is no records between the founding of this cemetery in 1848 and the beginning of the county administrator in 1949.

      The Oregon Historical Society has a book about this cemetery but it only lists names that appear in the headstones.

      The issue I have is that my Great grand father and Great grand mother had there marriage annul in 1906.  The actual documents are in the Oregon Archives in Salem.  Both remarried.  He died in Seattle, Washington and she died on Oakland, California.

      Now the dilemma.  When you go the cemetery you see a head stone that says Father and Mother.  It has the dates (Year only) that I have for my Great Grand Parents. (Birth and Death).  But who is really buried there?  

      And because my Great Grand mother died in 1930 and Great Grand Father died in 1936.  Divorces and annulments were taboo subjects during this period in our history and they both remarried.  So my dilemma.

      Eugene Melvin
      SW Portland, Oregon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://omls.oregon.gov/pipermail/or-roots/attachments/20040620/36159876/attachment.html>