Forest Home Cemetery

Smith Family in Milwaukee’s Garden Cemetery

Genealogy is an interesting journey. I think some of the most interesting parts of my journey have been when trying to pick up where previous generations have left off. In this case, I was picking up the trail left by my husband’s grandmother, Gertrude Ehle Witzel, as she searched for her mother’s family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her search led her to the Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee.

Grandma had found the burial locations of her mother’s parents – William Roderick Smith and Elizabeth Jane “Lila” Thompson Smith – at Forest Home. Grandma had contacted the cemetery and had received a sketch of the family plot along with the names of those interred there.

The paperwork provided by the cemetery showed the date purchased and dates and names of other transferees. Grandma made her own handwritten notes on the paperwork adding in what she knew about each of the people on the page. The names of the people buried in the family plot were recorded by the cemetery along with burial dates, but there were some names that Grandma didn’t recognize.

I picked up the trail of the unidentified interred many years later. The paperwork from the cemetery listed the following in order of interment date:

1.John E. Smith “37 years old” 2 June 1858

2. William G. Smith 15 September 1860

3. Mrs. Mary Smith 9 February 1863

4. H.J. Smith 19 November 1868

5. Nellie L. Smith 18 March 1880

6. William R. Smith 21 October 1885

7. Jane Smith 20 August 1890

8. Lila Thompson Smith 27 May 1933

Gramma’s notes show birth dates for most of those people and helped to fill in relationships. For example, #5 Nellie Smith is noted to be a daughter of #8 Lila Thompson Smith and #6 William R Smith. The remaining people have a note of what was written on the headstone (mother, father, brother, etc.).

It did take some time and some researching, but I was eventually able to identify the members of the family and their relationships. My family took a trip to the cemetery in 2010 and we were able to locate the graves in the family plot and photograph them.

And as you can see in this overview shot of the plot, the graves line up perfectly with the records sent by Forest Home. (Lila is in the foreground and Nellie’s grave is partially blocked by William R Smith’s stone in the upper right)

This capture of the arrangement of the graves is what is so often missing from sites like Find A Grave. The context of the burials is lost when you see only the individual stones. I am so glad that Gramma got these records from the cemetery! It’s very likely that I would never have known to look for these collateral ancestors and it would have been nearly impossible to determine their relationships.