The Story of Lottie Still - from Find-a-Grave to family connections

One of the activities we do here, basically at times when we have a little free time, is to photograph and transcribe gravestones in a local cemetery and adding them to the Find-a-Grave repository. Consider this something like the process of indexing that we do for FamilySearch genealogy service, only among gravestones. When we started the Hornell Rural Cemetery a few months ago, the list of memorials for the cemetery was about 7000, with most of them only dates and names and not pictures of gravestones. Now, after our work there, having finished about a month ago, there are 9770 memorials for the cemetery with 75% having gravestone pictures. We are now working on the Hornell Hope cemetery, which is about the same size.

One interesting aspect of this work is when we have a feeling of focus on individuals whose gravestones we record. In researching a bit further, especially through Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org on some of these, we find that we are related to many of the people buried in these cemeteries. This is primarily because many of our ancestors came from early times in New England and these people here also have the same background.

One such person of focus is Lottie Still.

As I was going from stone to stone, I photographed this stone. Later, back at home, I tried to figure out who the person was and find them in the directory. He name is on the top of the stone, barely readable, and the dates: 1875  and 1901 on the front side. That is all. I had to return and by closer examination and feeling the raised letters on the top, determined this to be Lottie Still. She died here at age 26. I dutifully entered the information into Find-a-Grave.

Somehow, Lottie did not leave me alone. I felt that I needed to get more about what happened. I kept searching records off an on for a few weeks and came up with little. I found other people with the name of Still in the area, but nothing seemed to match. I could not connect her to anybody here or to our family.

After a while, I found an obscure reference in a New York City newspaper mentioning a major train accident in Kansas City, Missouri and one of the victims was  Lottie Still from Hornellsville, New York. It appeared that she and a friend were traveling from Hornell to San Francisco and happened to be in the train when it was hit head-on by another train and many were injured and a few perished.

Then, a later date, I was visiting the Hornell City library and asked the head librarian about their genealogy references. I was not thinking at all about Lottie at this time, but for casual interest. But when she mentioned that they had microfilm copies of the local newspaper, and that of that, all had been digitized or indexed except for the year 1901. That triggered the thought that I might look for something about the train accident. After going through a lot of turns of the crank, I come up with the date and found several references to the accident and the mention of the local woman Lottie Still. The first accounts mentioned her as injured, then as seriously injured and then as having died - all in the hospital in Kansas City. The later article said she would be brought to Hornell for burial.

In another article (I almost missed it), Lottie was reported to be only having lived in Hornellsville for about 8 months, living with her uncle, Rev. W. H. Manning. That was a breakthrough. I love doing family history research as it is really like detective work and when you have a breakthrough, it is exciting!

Through more research, I found the sister to Rev. Manning and that she was born in Massachusetts and moved to San Francisco. In more research, I discovered Lottie's brothers and her mother's records, but never her father. Then, in a simple Google search, I found in a California Supreme Court record as issue of inheritance concerning Lottie's brothers and it mentioned the name of their (and Lottie's) father, Alden Peasely Still. Now I know that Lottie is the 9th cousin of my great-grandmother, Annie Isadore Roundy. We have been working on temple work for her and her family.

When we were in the Palmyra temple a couple of weeks ago I baptized Shauna as proxy for Lottie and did the confirmation after that. I felt a distinct feeling of celebration from the other side of the veil.