Tombstone Tuesday–John C. Hoehamer

John C. Hoehamer, Mount Hope Cemetery, Adams County, Indiana. (2013 photo by Karen)

John C. Hoehamer, Mount Hope Cemetery, Adams County, Indiana. (2013 photo by Karen)

This is the tombstone of John C. Hoehamer, located in Mount Hope Cemetery, Adams County, Indiana. The marker is inscribed:

John C.
Son of
N. & A. S.
Hoehamer
Died Jan 18, 1881
Aged 4 m. 8 d.

John C. Hoehamer was the son of Nicholas Hoehamer and his first wife Anna S. Manzelman. John was born 10 September 1880, as calculated from his tombstone. There is no birth or death entry for him in Zion Chatt’s records.

John C. was the sixth known child of Nicholas and Anna and was the second of their children to die young. His brother Henry A. Hoehamer died at age 6 years.

John C. was less than two months old when his mother died on 4 November 1880, at the age of 28 years, 5 months and 1 day. John C. died about 2 ½ months later. It must have been a very difficult time for the Hoehamer family.

 

2 comments

  1. What irony that the only record is the grave marker, and this was in the US only 100 years ago. Just a few years prior, even grave markers were just wooden crosses or planks. Medical arts and professionals were even more rare in the years before this event, so how many untold, unremembered infant/mother/ child deaths have passed into the fog of time with no record, no clues, no one with any recall? How the times have changed! But then again, in many places in the world life is still tenuous, tough and easily dismissed into the sands of time for poor, unknown souls cast into discard pits by pressures of those left to “survive.” How easily could we slip right back into those “times.”

    1. Yes, this may be the only record of his birth and death, since Indiana did not begin recording births and deaths until 1882. Even then, those events were not always documented if the family did not report the event.

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