All My Ancestors

Today at work I was looking for an online listing of a tombstone for a family I assumed was of German from Russia descendancy. I was looking at the usual sites–Findagrave and Internment.net and the web page for the county on Oklahoma’s GenWeb page.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with my great Aunt Edna. She was my maternal grandfather’s sister, the oldest child of that family. I was talking to her about the Karoma Cemetery in Goltry, Oklahoma where her parents and both sets of her grandparents, and a few of her great-grandparents are buried. (This is the cemetery I took my husband to early in my genealogy quest. We wrote down all the family names I knew and we came up with 86 people!) I told her that I’d found tombstones for all the family at Goltry but there was only a small funeral home marker on the grave of her Unruh grandparents who had died in 1929 and 1932.

She told me they’d be pretty unhappy to know there was even that much marking of their grave. I knew that side of the family were all Mennonites, but all Mennonites are not created equal. Benjamin John Unruh (1854-1929) and his wife Helena Nachtigal (1852-1932) were evidently from one of the more conservative sects. Aunt Edna said there had been no mirrors and no photographs in their home, and they would not approve of a tombstone to mark their grave. Then she grinned and said they were called the “fur-bearing Christians.” She said her grandfather Unruh always had a big long beard, also part of his religious beliefs. Aunt Edna’s description of them as “fur-bearing” still makes me smile.