Who?

Who was Gordie Harding?

I don't have any idea.

On Memorial Day I was at Athens Cemetery, Jewell County, Kansas to take pictures of headstones. I wanted to take the pictures around Memorial Day so there would be flowers on the graves.

The day was very warm, so I didn't get every headstone photographed.

Why do I do such silly things? I upload the photographs of the headstones to FindAGrave. Not all burials are recorded on FindAGrave, but there are millions there.

The headstone provides information to the family searching for their ancestor. While gravestones are not 100% accurate since they're created during times of grief, they can include information that is very hard to dispute.

The dates might be off by a few days. Maybe the engraver heard wrong. Maybe the engraver couldn't read the writing on the paper that contained the information. So, yes, some of the gravestones contain the best guess of the one doing the engraving.

Still there are some things that are engraved on gravestones that are very hard to argue about. When it lists the names of the children, that's hard to argue. Maybe the name isn't spelled exactly right, but to date the ones I've seen were close enough that you can't argue that this child belonged to these parents. When it states wife of or husband of, again, that's very hard to argue that it's wrong.

What does any of this have to do with Gordie S. Harding? All we know about Gordie is he was born about 1886 and died sometime in 1949.  There didn't appear to be any of Gordie's family buried in the same cemetery. Who was Gordie? Where did Gordie come from? All are questions that I can't answer. Gordie is a complete unknown to me.

From the way it appeared on Memorial Day, Gordie was all alone without any family around.

For some reason that really bothered me.

Before I left home I'd grabbed some flowers, suspecting there would be graves without flowers. I placed some flowers in front of Gordie's headstone and took the picture.

Whoever Gordie S Harding was, they deserved a picture of their gravestone with flowers. May Gordie rest in peace and may his family know exactly where his final resting place is located.

That's one of the purposes of FindAGrave, to make it easier for families to locate the final resting place of family members and it's a place that allows them to set up a memorial for their family member.

If you have a friend or family member who was cremated you can still add them to FindAGrave. Please do so. You do have to join to add people, but FindAGrave is completely free to use and join.

It's one more way to make sure our ancestors are not forgotten.

Also, if I have created a memorial for one of your family members and if you want to maintain the site, please use the edit button there and I'll be more than happy to transfer them to you. After all, you know more about them than I do.