A lot of Keepa stories have their origin in a line or two buried in a newspaper article or a letter. That line signals to me that something interesting or important happened somewhere to somebody, and I go off on a hunt to find out more. For every hunt that results in a story, though, there are probably 8 or 10 hunts that go nowhere – either I don’t find what I need in order to tell a story, or the story turns out to be unsuitable for one reason or another.

I went on one of those unproductive hunts on Saturday. The story turned out to be terribly sad, and personal (not of general historical interest, as life-shattering as it was to the families involved), and didn’t reveal anything especially newsworthy about Mormonism.

Still, because at the moment I’m involved in questions of how to teach others to do what I do, presenting this sad tale as an exercise in online detective work might be useful to some readers, illustrating how you can go about chasing some of the details in your own historical or family history work.

On Saturday morning, I read a telegram from 1929:

Yakima Wash
1929 Feb 4 PM 3 51

Presiding Bishops Office
North Main St
Bishops Bldg
Salt Lake City Utah

A good faithful woman married first husband in temple He died leaving her destitute with six small children She married a nonmember for home Has three children by marriage Friday he shot and killed her also himself Is it permissible to hold his funeral with hers Wire reply at once one hundred three South Seventh st

Pres John C Preston

There’s certainly a dramatic if terrible story in that. It seemed worth investigating; if the story itself was too narrow to be a Keepa story, it still might be worth filing away for future use in, say, an exploration of intimate violence in the Mormon community. (Clients are always looking for material on topics you might not expect – and such material is very difficult to find on demand. I’m always alert to stories that might be of interest to another historian someday, and file them away, on spec.)

The first step in expanding such a slim clue is to evaluate the document for every last clue you can wring out. In this case:

• No names are mentioned, other than the presiding elder wiring from Yakima. Identifying the people involved is of primary importance.
• The murder/suicide probably took place on or shortly before 4 February 1929.
• It may have taken place in Yakima, or it may have taken place in some other nearby community within the Yakima Branch – an area that could be quite wide, geographically. (In other words, I shouldn’t focus on Yakima so narrowly that I miss an event occurring next door.)
• The whole family – including the non-member husband since he had presumably Mormon children – is probably somewhere in FamilySearch, but I’ll need a name to search for them.
• The woman bore 9 children, and there could have been a gap in births between her two marriages. She could hardly have done that in less than 20 years, maybe 30 or more years. A rough estimate of her age, then, would be 40-50 years, perhaps a little older – so, likely born around 1880, give or take.
• A violent incident must have been covered by some newspaper; an incident involving the welfare of so many presumably young children would probably leave its mark in civil records.

I decided to go after the names first. Everything else would grow from there. And while other research paths could have worked just as well, this is what I did:

I first searched the database at newspapers.com, a subscription database that I find so valuable that I subscribe for the premium service (that is, it includes newspapers whose owners charge a fee for inclusion). Many libraries subscribe to the same database, so you can get free access almost everywhere.

The database is easily searched. I narrowed the search to newspapers of Washington State, and the time period of the search to January-February 1929. Then I played around with various search terms: “shot wife” and “murder suicide.” Alarmingly, there were so many hits that I added the term “Yakima” even though I wasn’t sure the event had actually taken place there.

And that turned up this article from a Spokane paper, along with several others that more or less repeated these facts.

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Okay, now we’re getting somewhere … but very slowly. “Mrs. Stone” isn’t given a full name, and “Harry Stone” isn’t distinctive enough to aid with searching. I tried googling, searching Family Search, and re-searching the newspaper database with Harry Stone’s name, without being able to sort through the massive numbers of hits to find anything relevant. He’s there, no doubt, but lost in the woods.

Next, I searched the Find-a-Grave website, a huge project dedicated to providing – free of charge – genealogical information found on gravestones, contributed by legions of volunteers. It can be a little tricky to search because you have to get everything just right – if Harry Stone had been Harold Stone or Henry Stone, a search for Harry Stone would have missed him. But I had a reliable date of death, so tweaking the search criteria quickly turned up his record.

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Well, the new middle initial may be useful, but I didn’t find what I had hoped to find: Find-a-Grave users often upload obituaries, or chart other family members buried in the same cemetery, but there is none of that here. It looks like another person named Stone is buried next to Harry T, but I can’t make out the name so it doesn’t lead to a new search.

Okay, with a more or less complete name for Harry T, and a death date and place, it’s time to turn to ancestry.com. (Some searchers probably would have gone there earlier, but I was hoping to find a shortcut with something on Find-a-Grave.)

Selecting the “birth, marriage and death” search option, I plug in the name Harry Stone and the death information of February 1929 (it’s often best not to zero in on precise names and dates, in case a transcriber misread something or there is some other variance) and Yakima, Washington. A fraction of a second later, I see a list of results – including the death record for Harry Stone on the precise date I’m hoping for, and the name of his wife: Emma Stone. It’s only a transcription of some key information from the death certificate, not the certificate itself, but it’s what I need.

Searching the same database for Emma Stone, I find the same type of record giving her parents’ names. The search results for Harry Stone’s death also turn up a marriage record from the Mormon colonies in Canada. That’s really all I need – more than enough information to search Family Search and to find the record for Emmaline Eliza Layne Smith Stone, 1881-1929 (Family Search has a fuzzy feature that is very helpful with names: searching for “Emma” turned up “Emmaline.” If Harry’s full name had been Henry or Harold, searching for “Harry” would still have found his record.)

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Everything matches: Names and dates and places, the names of Emma’s nine children, in two groups surnamed Smith and Stone. Her Memories page includes a few more clippings from Canadian sources, indicating that Emma’s family had objected to the planned joint funeral and burial – and that the funeral, in charge of the Church, had been changed at the last minute: Harry Stone was buried with only a graveside prayer; Emma Stone was given a funeral, her body returned to Raymond, Alberta, for burial next to her first husband.

So that is the story – or at least a listing of bare facts – behind the telegram for advice from the Presiding Bishop’s Office. It is not a story, on its own, that is particularly revealing of Mormon history, except, perhaps, an acknowledgment that such dreadful things have befallen Latter-day Saints – Church membership is no guarantee of a peaceful, happy life. But this exercise does point to the tremendous set of resources we have at our fingertips, for solving certain types of historical problems. Even when you start with practically nothing, it is often still possible to follow the trail.