Tour of our Ancestors in Missouri - June 2004  

There's a phrase in a song about Mid-Missouri's history that talks about "living 
out their dreams" and that is what I did last week with Karl and Laurene.  We 
visited cemeteries in Auxvasse and Bachelor where Kate Hays' mother and family 
lived, checked out records in the Callaway County Seat of Fulton, MO as well as 
Callaway County Historical Society records, and visited the grave of William 
Thompson Hays, Harry Hays' father in Napton, MO not far away from Callaway County.
Then we drove down to Oronogo, MO near Joplin where Kate Hays lived when she was 
a girl, found the grave of her sister, Nora, who died when she was about 2 years 
old, also that of  Laurence Cobb's brother in Lamar, MO, and visited the community
of Rocky Comfort, MO where Kate Hays lived just before coming to Wyoming.

Missouri was cool and sometimes a bit rainy, a great improvement over the 100 
degree temperatures we sometimes have in mid-June!

We found the graves of the one great grandparent who isn't buried in Wyoming 
- as well as three great-great grandparentts so now we know where all of them 
are!   William Thompson Hays is in Napton and his wife, Mary Graham Hays, is 
buried in the Reader Cemetery along with Robert and Letitia Shelton Gooldy.  
Letitia's parents, William Housen Shelton and  Nancy Wood Gilbert Shelton, 
are buried in the most beautiful spot in MO, Old Hickory Grove Cemetery, near 
the north boundary of Callaway County, AND Alfred Gooldy and his second wife, 
Mary Elliott, are buried in Grand Prairie Cemetery in Auxvasse, MO where Grandma 
talked about visiting her relatives on farms nearby.  I was so excited! 

It has been my dream to show some of you where Kate and Harry lived when they 
were children. The area around Napton and Arrow Rock, Mo. as well as Oronogo 
and Rocky Comfort, never looked better, green and covered with wildflowers.  
Gardens looked fruitful and I remembered Grandpa telling about getting stung 
on the toe by a very large bumblebee while walking barefoot in the garden.

But to find all these graves of the generation before Grandma and Grandpa was an 
added gift.  We knew that Harry Hays' father was buried in MO and I have visited 
that lovely spot many times, writing a monograph about it which I shared with 
you at the first reunion.  But I, at least, didn't know we would find any of 
the other great grandparents - or step-grandparent in the case of Mary Elliott.  
(Robert Gooldy's mother, Sophia Pollard, is buried in Bedford County, Virginia, 
as she died there before his father and family came west.)

Karl and I had done a lot of preparation, visiting some cemeteries on the way 
home from the 2002 reunion, talking with the local storekeeper who knew Grandma's 
cousins, the Sheltons and Wellses, and pointed out other cemeteries to us and 
searching on-line in Callaway County records.  

On a trip earlier in June, I was surprised when Karl said he had found Gooldy 
graves in the Grand Prairie Cemetery on the north side of Auxvasse.  He found 
our great grandfather,  Alfred Gooldy;  Alfred's second wife, Mary Elliott whom 
Robert praised as "the best stepmother in the world"; his son who was older 
than Robert,  William Jesse, a Confederate War veteran; and Wm. J's family.  I 
didn't even know Alfred was in MO  - all the info I had was from  Bedford County, 
VA!  And I hadn't read our info about Wm J. for so long I had forgotten about him 
entirely. So we were so pleased to be able to show these graves to Laurene.  

I also had no records of Letitia Shelton's parents in Missouri but she was born 
here.  We looked for her mother, Nancy Wood Gilbert Shelton who, our records show,
died in Bachelor, MO close to Auxvasse but I hadn't found her in the Bachelor 
Cemetery.  Nor did I find her listed in any cemetery that is listed on-line in 
Callaway County.  But when we were in Fulton, the Historical Society was open 
in the evening because of a street festival.  Members there showed us listings 
for several other cemeteries including the Old Hickory Grove cemetery - where 
she was!

When we visited the next day, we found that  William Housen Shelton, Grandma's 
grandfather, was buried there also.  His name is on another side of the same 
stone but much harder to read.  That cemetery is on a little hill and the 
wildflowers all around were just incredible - 

I was proud when we mentioned the name, Gooldy, the Historical Society folk 
immediately led us to information and a wonderful photo of William Jesse Gooldy, 
the last Civil War veteran to die in Callaway County.  Uncle Jim Gooldy, whose 
history is similar, died a few years before Wm. J,, also in Fulton but we haven't 
gotten to visit his cemetery yet.

We drove on to Arrow Rock, MO which has to be close to where Harry Hays lived 
before going to Wyoming because Aunt Neal (Harry's older sister, Cornelia) was 
in Arrow Rock when she signed a legal paper documenting the birth of Harrison 
Lowe Hays.  That's my favorite town in Missouri, along the Missouri River and 
just about exactly as it was when the riverboat trade ended.  We stayed at an 
elegant bed and breakfast and went to the Lyceum Theater there to hear John 
Denver's songs in a presentation called Almost Heaven.

William Thompson's Hays grave is in a well-kept cemetery at Zoar Baptist Church 
in Napton -- only approximately 12 miles (via Hwy 41 & E Hwy) from Arrow Rock.  
We then drove down to southwest MO and stayed in Mt. Vernon, MO though we didn't 
get to visit Elaine Harison there.  The next day we checked out the town of 
Oronogo where Grandma, along with all her siblings except Will, was born.. 

We looked in cemeteries in Oronogo for the grave of Grandma's sister who had died 
after her family was in Colorado and had quite an adventure visiting the home of 
the mayor who keeps the records for the big cemetery there.   The lady mayor was 
in her office but sent us to her house - down across the low-water bridge in town 
to the house with the red Toyoto pickup.  "Go around to the back and into the 
yard and garage where you will find a short fat fellow in a red T-shirt."  We 
did and found her husband working with his 95-year-old Pappy on garden produce.  
He asked us into the kitchen where he cleared away the breakfast dishes and huge 
footed glasses that had held blackberry cobbler at suppertime the night before 
so we could look through the big cemetery book. But we didn't find a Nora Gooldy 
listed there.  "Guess the little tyke must be buried somewhere else," he said.

I had gotten a property deed describing land that  Robert Gooldy had owned west of
 Oronogo so we located it and checked out a cemetery nearby that showed up on 
the old county highway  map we had.  (Laurie's intuition at work.)  There was 
an obviously-cared-for stone for Nora Gooldy in an open space with trees and 
plants growing around it - what a find.! We can't read the verse at the bottom, 
even tried rubbing it, but will continue trying to find out what it says.  The 
cemetery is named Twin Groves.

Laurene had mentioned that her dad had lived in Lamar, MO before going to Wyoming 
and Lamar is just 30 miles north of Oronogo.  Again the county historical society 
members were a great help, finding cemetery listings, obituaries, and newspaper 
articles.  But I happened to find a picture of Laurence, age 12, in a school 
picture that also showed his sister, Florence, and perhaps his older brother, 
John, who was our neighbor on the Little Snake River.  In the town cemetery we 
found the grave of a brother of Laurence's, Eugene, who had died young.

Our last official stop was Rocky Comfort, a lovely farming community near the 
southeast corner of MO - where houses and fences are made of stone but the 
country looks fertile and beautiful.  We ate chiles poblanos at a Mexican 
restaurant where I have gotten biscuits and gravy in the morning when I passed 
through there in the past.

The bookmark I made for us to use as we searched cemeteries listed other family 
names - Hamilton, Maupin, Muzzy, Gilbert, Laws, etc. - and we recorded our finds, 
not knowing who might be a close relative or where we might find information 
that would lead to a closer view of our families and the times in which they 
lived.  Some of the information Grandma gave me after I moved to Missouri was 
about her mother's brother, James Preston Gilbert and his family, including Lena 
Shelton Wells, her favorite cousin, and other family members.  We found many of 
the Sheltons in Callaway County cemeteries.  She had also given me a listing of 
Robert Gooldy's sister, Mary Ann, who married Green Huddleston and raised a large 
family in Callaway County.  They are buried at Grand Prairie Cemetery along with 
Alfred Gooldy - so my stack of family group sheets grows higher!

Some of the rest of the fun was finding geocaches in state parks and the town 
of Marionville where we didn't see the white squirrels, Karl's finding benchmarks 
along the way, stops at various antique shops, some shopping in Branson along 
with Laurene's and my show at the Dixie Stampede, Dolly Parton's show with 32 
horses, some good trick riders, Civil War "battle", buffalo stampede, and a good 
dinner served as we watched. The three of us visited and shared memories and 
stories about our own families, checked out lots of Missouri's flowers and 
trees, and studied a little Ozark geology.

Maps, 4-generation charts and family group sheets, copies of photos, GPS 
latitudes and longitudes of cemeteries along with some of the graves and other 
information can be seen by selecting the links above (in this narrative) or can be
accessed on line at:   http://www.geocities.com/gooldy_hist