Posthumous travels
Thanks to a new online database, I found out that a my grandparents moved around a bit...after they had both passed on.
Why did they spend their first years of eternal repose in Little Rock, Arkansas, a place where our family has no connections? One can only speculate. But the Familysearch.org database "Arkansas, Oakland and Fraternal Historic Cemetery Records, 1867-2013" revealed a surprising fact.
The index card shows that Alva and Marie MacLaughlan's "cremains" (as cremated remains are called in the industry) were removed from the Oakland and Fraternal Historic Cemetery Park in 1991, when their daughter requested that they be relocated to a cemetery in Santa Barbara. The request makes some sense. Their daughter was living in Santa Barbara at the time. The card noted that the plot owner was Mrs. Dolores C. Brewer but the daughter requesting the move was Carole Walkley. In reality they were the same person.
It wouldn't be clear to most folks why two different names for the same woman would be used on this record, but it was necessary in her eyes. Her partner, Reuben Walkley, had an aversion to her family and insisted that she change her name. Of course he could have done that by marrying her, but he was still married to his first wife.
In 1957, why was Little Rock, Arkansas the best place for Alva and Marie? They had no family there. Their children and grandchildren couldn't visit them there. Of their four children, one lived in Florida, one in Nebraska, and two in California. The only possible reason: Dolores' then-husband Jim Brewer had been born in Arkansas. Maybe these were left-over family plots and convenient to use. On the other hand, there's a timing issue that is a bit of a puzzle.
From the same collection are handwritten entries from the cemetery sexton's daily records, and above is the one for Marie, who died March 16, 1956 in Los Angeles. But the sexton's record says she arrived at Oakwood & Fraternal Cemetery in Little Rock on March 7, 1957, nearly a year later.
Where had she been during the previous year? On somebody's mantlepiece? In somebody's garage? Does this suggest a family rumpus over the burial location? Probably...but there's nobody around to confirm this theory.
Alva died on August 18, 1957, also in Los Angeles, but his banishment to Little Rock was more punctual and he arrived a month after his death. There Alva and Marie resided together on Poplar Drive until 1991, thirty-four years later. Then it was off to Santa Barbara, California for them both.
Strangely, Dolores (or Carole, if you prefer) told no one in the family that her parents' remains had gone a-wandering. It remained unknown to all of us until Find-A-Grave indexed them and revealed Alva and Marie to be Californians once again, this time in perpetuity...we hope!