Since last weekend, I’ve been working on documenting the stones I photographed at new Windsor Presbyterian and so far, over 70 of them have been fully identified and linked to their respective family member. While I could just upload them all as is, I like to show where they fit in their family trees, which takes a bit longer. If you’d like to see them so far, you can go to the Family Files section for this graveyard and check them out. One of the things that you will see is how many of these lines are related to each other, their members having inter-married numerous times.

It’s actually a rather gloomy Saturday morning, with overcast skies following two days of rain, but it’s a great day to photograph headstones! With a little free time on my hands today, I wandered over to the Presbyterian church yard here in New Windsor and spent some time snapping photos. It doesn’t actually take that much time to take the actual pictures - what is time-consuming is doing the research behind the folks whose stones they are. This morning’s session yielded over 400 pictures, so it will take a bit of time to get them all uploaded and identified.

The Carroll County Times, in November, published a story about the twin sons, Samuel and Joseph, of Peter and Margaret (Byers) Trite, who lost their lives on 7/31/1902, after rescuing their older brother, Edward, who had lost consciousness while cleaning out a well. Apparently the well was in pretty bad shape, and Edward fell out of the bucket lowered into the well due to the poisonous gases found there. Sam and Joseph went down after him and managed to load him into the bucket which was then raised to the surface. By the time the bucket was lowered to retrieve the twins, they were too overcome by the gases to climb into the bucket and died before help could arrive. The twins were both buried at the Pipe Creek Brethren cemetery, but the author of the article was unable to find out what happened to Edward, the older brother, calling it a bit of a mystery.

I guess she didn’t look quite far enough. Edward and his wife Ida, and their three children, Norman, Ruth and Frank, were living in New Windsor at the time that the 1910 census was taken, but Edward apparently died before 1920, as his widow was living with her children in Hagerstown in 1920. Considering his relative youth at the time, it is likely that his health may have been seriously impaired as a result of his time in the well, but that’s about as far as the mystery goes.

In an ongoing effort to bring the best of location-based genealogy to your desktop, Carroll County MD Genealogy has made what is hopefully its last move for a long time. In the process, we have a new look but have retained all of the structure of the past site. With this wider format, we hope to be able to avoid the cluttered feeling of the old site.

Users from the old site have been brought over intact to this site, so they should experience no problems logging in to the site. The biggest advantage to the new site is the virtually unlimited amount of space we now have in which to build!