Found him! George R. White (1849-1922)

Of the eleven children of Alexander and Hannah White, one has eluded me for some thirty years: George R., their third son. In the mid-1980s I read obituaries preserved by family descendants of his siters Margery (Spinks; d. 1911) and Nancy (Grubbs; d. 1919), both of which named their brother George. Margery's obituary only names George; Nancy's says that George was living in California.

The last federal census in which I can find George R. is 1870, when he was enumerated with his parents in Wabash Township, Fountain County, Indiana (his place of birth). His father names him in his 1884 will, bequeathing him a buggy.

Based on his sister's obituaries, I thought that George R. had gone west and disappeared. Perhaps he had changed his name, died in a place where nobody knew him, had enlisted in the military, or even gone to Canada or overseas. None of these options had yielded anything. I cannot claim to have been able to make an exhaustive search of the relevant records, as my residence abroad itself has limited my access to the pertinent records.

And then, when visiting my family earlier this month, I had the luck to discover that the local LDS Family History Center had access to one of the major online historical newspaper sites. That site had a portion of Fountain County, Indiana newspapers from the late 1880s to the early 1930s.

When I conducted a search for George White, lo and behold (Covington Republican, Friday, 10 November 1922, page one):



Naturally, the obituary appears in one of the less-well-preserved pages of the paper! But that I was able to find it at all, and without traveling to Indiana to pore through reel after reel of microfilm . . .

I felt quite foolish when I read the obituary, for it is clear that George was buried in the same cemetery as his parents and sisters. I had not located his marker in my search of the cemetery in the 1980s. I had made an unwarranted assumption that he had left the county. I ought to have tried to locate burial records for the church. I could easily have missed the marker; perhaps it had been lost over time, or perhaps one never existed. He died unmarried; there were no immediate family in the area to mourn him and perhaps to foot the cost of a marker. At the time of his death, one brother (William) lived in southwestern Missouri; the other (Albert) in Kern County, California.

As I searched for more references to George White in the local Covington papers, I learned that it had been reported in a local newspaper that in late 1910 he had applied to the newly-built state sanatarium in Rockville, Indiana. Another article published in February 1911 noted that he had been refused admittance because of the advanced state of his tuberculosis. It went on to say that his Knights of Pythias lodge had given him the means to go to New Mexico for treatment.

The above obituary notes that George died in Hot Springs, Arkansas but had lived in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. Both cities have tuberculosis hospitals; I wonder if he died in one of the Hot Springs hospitals. I have located what looks like his Arkansas death certificate, which I will order the first chance I get.

According to family tradition, his brother David, my great-great grandfather (1834-1879) had gone west on doctor's orders. Was the climate in western Indiana particularly conducive to tuberculosis?

I've now accounted for all of the known children of Alexander and Hannah White. I feel a little sad at the closing of this chapter in my research; he was the "mystery man" of my family. Apparently the only one for whom he was a mystery was me. This discovery has brought home to me yet again the importance of searching all possible local sources for information about a person. There are more lessons for me to draw from my search for George Riley White. For now, I'm simply happy to have found him at last.