Find a Grave

Scholefield Family Tree

I posted the photographs of the graves located in Tucson to Find A Grave. While I was there, I searched the database for other Scholefields since the name is uncommon. Only 49 memorials have that last name (including the three I added).

One is an entry for George Parsons Scholefield who was born in 1860 but is listed with an unknown death date. Since the George I have been tracing has the same birthdate, I checked it out and discovered that the person who posted this memorial posted the BACKSIDE of a stone and added the data as if the people were acutally buried there (and, yes, I tried to point this out to the person, and she refuses to understand the concern and got touchy when I suggested to her how she could make the situation clearer).

Luckily, since this is the same George, and the person did photograph both sides of the stone in question, memorials were also created for his parents¹ (however, their memorials are missing the backside of their stone ::sigh::).

Spencertown Cemetery
Spencertown
Columbia County
New York

Major Charles M. Scholefield
1819 – 1869
Helen Marr DeGraff
His Wife
1842 – 1920
Faithful Unto Death

Their Children
George Parsons Scholefield
1860 – ____
Virginia Scholefield McMillan
1862 – ____
Florence Scholefield Shaw
1864 – ____
Mae Scholefield Edwords
1869 – 1917

Hunting through the other memorials in the cemetery, I find that Florence is buried in Spencertown Cemetery with N. Archibald Shaw.² He is presumably her husband. Her death date is listed there as 1923. Mae’s middle name turns out to be Stuart, and she married a man named Guy J. Edwords.³ Virginia is not buried there under the last name McMillan.

The foremost question to be answered after locating this cemetery is: Why is the family buried in Columbia County, New York, instead of Oneida County where they lived from 1850-1870? Especially since that date includes Charles’s death date of 1869? And most especially since Utica and Spencertown are 125 miles apart?

Research Plan:

1. Determine the family connection to Spencertown.
2. Locate George’s siblings on the censuses to fill in the basic information about their families.

1. Jim Tipton, Find A Grave, digital images (http://www.findagrave.com : accessed 11 Sep 2008), photograph, Major Charles M. Scholefield (1819-1869) and Helen Marr DeGraff Scholefield (1842-1920) gravemarker, Spencertown Cemetery, Spencertown, Columbia, New York.
2. Ibid., photograph, N. Archibald Shaw (1861-1835) and Florence Scholefield Shaw (1864-1923) gravemarker, Spencertown Cemetery, Spencertown, Columbia, New York.
3. Ibid., photograph, Mae Stuart Scholefield Edwords (1870-1917) gravemarker, Spencertown Cemetery, Spencertown, Columbia, New York.