Ancestry Magazine

My husband, Bob, was three years old when his father was killed during World War II. When Bob turned sixty we got serious about gathering everything we could about his father—stories, photos, and ancestry.

My husband, Bob, was three years old when his father was killed during World War II. When Bob turned sixty we got serious about gathering everything we could about his father—stories, photos, and ancestry.

I became intrigued with the gravestone of Thomas Divine—my husband’s first ancestor in America. I saw pictures of the original stone and read about how it had been taken by a family member for “safe-keeping” in 1975 because it was old and deteriorating. It had been handcrafted from a field stone, probably by one of Thomas’s sons. Neither the lettering nor the spelling reflected education or wealth, but it did illustrate a lot of time and effort spent by someone devoted to a lost loved one. A new stone had been erected in its place.

When anyone asked about the original stone, the family member who removed it always replied that it was being safely kept. She had no children, so when she passed away, family members wondered who would become the new keeper of the stone. But among the many Thomas Divine descendants doing genealogy, no one could ascertain where the stone had gone. It seemed to have just disappeared.

My husband and I located a copy of the obituary of the woman who took the stone. One individual named in the obituary was completely unknown to the family. It took me a few days to find her, but even tually a member of one of the historical societies gave me her phone number.

It was a long-shot, but I called and explained that I was looking for a particular headstone and told her its last known whereabouts. She replied that she didn’t know anything about it, but that Kimball Sterling had auctioned off the property.

I located Kimball Sterling online and sent him an e-mail. A few days passed before I received a response, but it was worth the wait. He had contacted Mr. K, a dealer in folk art, who had bought the stone at the auction and kept it for nearly five years. The week before we called, he had sold it to another individual who wanted to photograph it for a book on folk art. Fortunately, the new owner was willing to sell it back to us. Bob and I could not believe how timely our inquiry had been. Another month and the stone may have been irretrievable.

We set up an appointment to drive to Bristol, Tennessee, to purchase the stone from Mr. K for one hundred dollars. We had traveled that road many times, never knowing how close we were to the stone.

When we arrived, we were not surprised to find that the stone had increased in value during our drive. Mr. K now requested two hundred dollars. We figured his firsthand account of the finding of the stone was worth the extra hundred dollars.

He told us that the day of the auction, he and the auctioneer had walked through the outbuildings. The auctioneer had caught the toe of his shoe on something in the dirt floor of a shed and bent down to see what it was. With his finger, he worked the edge of the object out of the dirt and picked it up. It appeared to be an old field stone that someone had placed there to use as a step just inside the door. But when he held it, he could feel indentations on the bottom. He turned the object over and realized it was a gravestone.

The stone was in excellent condition. In fact, it was in such good shape that Mr . K thought it was probably fake. The date of death was 1840, but the stone did not appear to be 163 years old. Mr. K saw it as a wonderful piece of folk art and purchased it. Over the next few months he researched the stone and found that it was authentic and a well-preserved piece.

We carefully packaged the stone and began our drive home. We were amazed that we actually had it in our possession. There were innumerable ways that stone could have been lost to the Divine family and yet, by this fortuitous chain of events, the family suddenly had it back.

I do not believe that the woman who placed that stone upside down in the shed ever intended for it to be found. Perhaps its primitiveness did not reflect the family origin as she felt it should have.

We’ll never know her reasons for removing it from the cemetery, but a replica of the original has been made and erected at the grave site in Big Creek Cemetery in eastern Tennessee, and the actual stone is in safe-keeping until it can be placed in an appropriate museum where all of Thomas Divine’s descendants can see it.

Bob and I often think how wonderful it was that the auctioneer stubbed his toe and that he was not inclined to leave our stone unturned.

Glennis Wasmer is a home-based certified medical transcriptionist. She and her husband love history and spending time with family; they have found that genealogical research is the perfect mix of their interests.