I found Alice and Paul today, which proves the universe has a soft spot for bumblers like I. Stumble around long enough and y0u'll find what you want.
I wanted to find Alice and Paul Shipman to help complete their story. Around the time of their marriage in the late 1860s, Alice's father, Col. Davidson, had a house built for her not two blocks away from our home near the Delaware River. Their house was a country manor. The architecture was Second Empire, influenced by French designs a couple of decades earlier.
The manor is now the home of the Red Dragon Canoe Club, to which Monica and I belong. Club members have believed for at least the 18 years we've been around that the house was built for a wealthy couple who never actually lived in it. Indeed, when a researcher completed an application to have the property listed on the state and federal registers of historic places, she wrote that the Shipmans had been on a world tour when the house was built but lost their wealth before they were ever able to live in their home.
The club members are trying to make the mansion a museum, and so I've been digging around to learn more. What I've found is that the Shipmans probably lived in the manor until their deaths two weeks apart in 1917. A reporter for the New York Times visited them in 1879 and wrote about their "beautiful villa overlooking the Delaware River."
I'd contacted Eastern Kentucky University because I'd been told they had some documents in their archives about Paul Shipman. Those documents arrived yesterday, and among them was a reference to the Shipmans' burial in Laurel Hill Cemetery.
I'd guess Laurel Hill covers two to three acres. I went there at noon on my way to work on Robin. I parked the car and began wandering aimlessly between the rows of headstones, trying to see if there was some pattern; if, for example, the graves that were filled between say 1890 and 1920 were in one quadrant. There was no pattern that I could discern, and I was about to return to the car but decided to make one more loop.
The names were Italian and Irish and Polish and other eastern European origins. There were very few names that I would categorize as being from the same ancestry as Shipman. Nor was there any noticeable segregation of the graves of one ethnic group from those of another.
I moved beyond the car and chose one lane of graves for my final pass.
Half way along the lane, I looked down. There were Alice and Paul.
Their stone is flush to the ground. Unlike some other such stones, theirs has been tended by someone to keep the grass from growing over its smooth granite face.
Now I'm wondering if there is some descendant who lives nearby, someone who could fill in the missing details of their lives.