Touchdown Thursday: Finding tombstone of Paul K Joyce

I'm creating a new daily genealogy blog theme, Touchdown Thursday.

Touchdown Thursday is dedicated to those yay! and hooray! moments in my family history search....those ancestors that seem to hide from me but somehow I find....those brick walls that I can finally take down....

I'd love for you to join me on Thursdays, and tell me how you managed to tear down a brick wall, find a missing piece, hit a homerun, or score a touchdown.


This week's touchdown moment was finally finding the grave for Brenden's uncle, Paul Keith Joyce.

From his obituary and family attending his funeral, I knew he was buried in Spring Lake Cemetery in Aurora, Illinois.

• I left messages on the cemetery's voicemail 5 times (office only open a couple hours during the week) and never got a call back.
• I searched Kane County's cemetery index online and found a liitle more info....he was buried in the RG section. I took a ride to the cemetery and found all the sections marked... Except for RG section. The other sections were marked east and west, so where was this mysterious section?
• I checked online for a map, no luck.
• I tried the cemetry office, closed.
• I found an internet posting saying that RG stands for Rear Grotto. So, I took another trip to the cemetery and went to the rear. The rear of the cemetery was being renovated and there were dirt piles everywhere, I got upset thinking they had dug up Brenden's uncle!
• Brenden was also upset so he called his dad. His dad told us we were looking in the wrong section...sigh of relief....he was near the front of the cemetery about 100 yards from the fence.
• We got excited and went to take a look, it just happened to be Memorial Day weekend and Paul was a veteran.
  

Paul Joyce wasn't 100 yards from the fence near the front, as his dad had promised, he was in the middle of the cemetery in the Rose Garden (RG).

The only reason we finally found him was by searching for graves with American flags in unmarked sections of the cemetery. A lot of searching, but it finally paid off!

Touchdown, score one for me, I found Paul Keith Joyce!

Picture by Melissa Brown, May 30, 2010, Spring Lake Cemetery, Aurora, Kane, Illinois, Section: Rose Garden (RG)

How did I get started in genealogy?

I'm love listening to genealogy podcosts, helps my hour car ride to work seem shorter, so I'll start this blog the way Kory Meyerink starts his interviews, "How did you get started in genealogy?"

During the Christmas shopping season last year I started looking for my significant other's, Brenden, family crest. With a surname of Joyce, I thought it would be pretty easy. Then, I discovered there were multiple crests depending on what country and town his family originated. I started to research his family, hoping to complete my search in a month or two, trying to determine where his family originated. (All while trying to keep my search a secret from Brenden, hard to get information from his family members without him finding out...)

Well, as you probably guessed, or know from experience, the search turned into a much larger genealogy project, as I expanded my search to my family. I purchased an ancestry.com subscription for myself for Christmas, and I got Brenden involved in the search. Now we are both addicted to genealogy and finding our roots.

We still haven't been able to prove what part of the world his family originated. We're pretty certain his family was from Ireland, but records of the Joyce family have also been found in England and Scotland. We were able to trace his line of Joyce's back to the early 1700's in the United States, in Virginia and South Carolina, connected with some long lost relatives, found published genealogies and pictures about his family, census records, graves, and wills, but from there the search has gone cold. We'll keep at it, along with the rest of our family lines. Once you start, you can't stop. I am addicted and loving every minute of it.