As a child, I lived two blocks from the Greenwood Cemetery in Vernon, Shiawassee County, Michigan, the small town cemetery where many of my relatives were buried. I'm old enough to remember Memorial Day here in the United States being called Decoration Day by the older people. During my childhood it was still observed on the 30th of May, before it became a three-day weekend when everyone goes “Up North” here in Michigan. Then, it was a homecoming event in Vernon with a parade followed by a dinner at the Methodist Church and out-of-town relatives came to visit the graves and the living. This cemetery is associated with many good family memories.
On the flip side, it is easy to assume familiarity from childhood means total knowledge. I walked by Joey Yerkes (1880-1896) many, many times before it dawned on me to ask “Who IS Joey?” Fortunately, his grave was marked with a stone which had very legible full birth and death dates. But, unlike others in the Yerkes families, Joey was by himself instead of in a family plot. So “Whose child was Joey?”
I thought the offspring of known relatives were accounted for and realized Joey didn't match up with the information I had. My 3xgreat grandfather Jonathan Yerkes and his children were early settlers. The families of his two sons Charles Reeves Yerkes, my 2x great grandfather, and Joseph Watkins Yerkes accounted for most, if not all, the Yerkes burials in Greenwood cemetery. Their family plots are directly across from each other, not too far from Joey's grave.
Although the cemetery began in the 1860's, the records only go back to about 1900. FamilySearch has Michigan birth and death records for the time period, but the records themselves tend to be incomplete so finding no birth or death record for Joey wasn't a surprise. With a birth date of May 1880, Joey should have appeared on the 1880 U.S. Census with his birth family, but no Joseph born in May showed up, at least not in Shiawassee County. The obituaries from the Owosso newspapers (the largest town in the county) have been compiled and I already had all the Yerkes accounted for. Vernon had once had a newspaper, but copies have not survived.
With a few exceptions, the Yerkes surname in the United States links back to the same family who originated in Pennsylvania and had a notable (or notorious) member, Charles Tyson Yerkes, who commissioned a family history in the early twentieth century. I already had copies of the pages for family from the pre-digitized age on file so it wasn't difficult to take another look and find that great uncle Joseph's two sons didn't have much information about their families and neither had stayed in Michigan.
About the time I began this search, the library at Corunna, the county seat for Shiawassee County, made available the digitized version of the Corunna Journal newspaper which included 1896. Since I had a death date of 12 December if there were anything it shouldn't be too hard to find. This weekly collected items from the other county newspapers and provided a breakthrough.
In the Vernon locals column in the issue of 17 December 1896 this item appeared:
“Joe, the 15-year-old son of Albert Yerkes, has been seriously ill the past two weeks with appendicitis, but is convalescent.”
The publication date was five days AFTER Joey's death so one definitely shouldn't believe everything in print. Checking later editions for more information, I found this was the only mention of Joey; one wouldn't know he had died at the time from this source alone.
The pieces began to fit together. Joey did appear on the 1880 Census with his parents, Albert and Matilda (Hardwick) Yerkes, but as Albert E. born in April not May. Joey’s father Albert was the son of Joseph Watkins Yerkes so Joey did not belong to some unknown Yerkes family after all.
I think Joey was buried in what was to be the family plot for the Albert Yerkes family, but a few years after his death, the family moved to the western United States. They were living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 1904 and then Skagit,Washington by 1910. His parents and siblings died and were buried out there and Joey ended up by himself back in Michigan.
