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

[CARROLLOUC at aol.com]

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/20040620/044118b0/attachment.html>