In an earlier post I described my discovery that my Great-Grandfather Howard Bradell was not only buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Wheatridge, Colorado BUT that he was buried there with his second wife. Both of these facts were new information but bet you can guess which was the greater surprise.
Expecting this to become something of a brickwall, I braced for the worst. This is one of my maternal grandmother’s lines. The surname is not common, has about a zillion other ways it can be spelled, and offers up random people who appear and disappear in the records. According to family tradition[1], the name was made up by combining two other names upon immigrating to the U.S.
So, because I’m still sitting by my computer while talking to my Mom, I did a quick check at findagrave.com. Yep, nine entries for Bradell. Out of 47 MILLION (if you believe the web site advertising). And one of the nine folks listed belongs to my family. Note to self to add these other folks to my “possibly related” pile which one day will be a proper research log. I signed, but knowing I would be out to Colorado in a few days, I didn’t fret. Yet.
Skip forward to the following week and a happy ending to our story. My Grandmother had mentioned the whole “Dad’s buried here with second wife” thing to my Uncle several years ago when they were there and they were able to locate the numbered marker. He doesn’t have a headstone (because then we could probably find him-ha!). We needed help to find it again, but now we have the pictures to locate it the next time.
Howard Joseph Bradell, born 29 May 1891 in New York City, New York and died 07 November 1944 in the Denver area, Colorado, was cremated and is buried in the family plot of his second wife, Ella L. Jones[2].
There are still questions to be resolved including if they were actually married or if it was a common-law marriage. Their youngest son, Will, was along for this adventure and he hadn’t even known about Ella. I also need to document their travels back and forth between Colorado and Illinois and determine time frames as the family wasn’t always all in the same spot. Definitely a case of something I need to ask Will about while I can (he is 92 after all).
But for now, we know where Howard is and there are now 11 results when you search on “Bradell” at findagrave.com (I added Howard and his eldest daughter Elizabeth). He was even listed in the records of the cemetery office. This is better than I expect of his wife, Bertha. Going back to family tradition, she was cremated also, but was kept around the house until her mother passed. At that time, she was ‘smuggled’ into her mother’s casket and buried along with her. Seriously? These people are something of a pain at times. But at least in this case, we know the story.
-space-[1] Which has every genealogist reading at this point uttering “ut-oh”.
[2] Jones? *eyes rolling heavenward*
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