Tuesday Tombstone - April 13, 2010

 I am trying to get ready for a trip to Boston to watch my brother run the Boston Marathon! We are so excited but there is a long drive ahead of us and I have to come from Chicago to Michigan first…On Friday we will all leave Michigan and drive to Niagara Falls. My mother’s side of the family originated from the Niagara Area so today, I am going to show you some tombstones from that side of our family. A few years back I was able to locate a cousin who is 7 generations removed and still lives in the Niagara area. She is very nice lady whose name is Corlene Taylor. We are going to meet her for dinner on Friday. I am really looking forward to it.

So today we will honor some Hainers in the Niagara area.  As a family, we have visited the Niagara area many times and we always visited the usual tourist venues not realizing that we had a family history connection in the area.   So in 2003 when my husband and I visited the area and we met Corlene, she was able to gave me a very different tour of the Niagara Falls area, a “this is where your Hainer’s lived” tour.

As it turned out, the campground which we were camping at according to Corlene was likely the hunting grounds that the Hainers hunted on. The land which they received from Queen Ann was just down the road from the campground. They would have lived in a small corner settlement near by. There had been a small church and quite a large cemetery located at the corner. It is likely that our Hainers are buried there and we know for sure that some are because their tombstones were some of the remaining few which survived years of neglect and cemetery looting. The Church was torn down many years ago and the neglected cemetery became over grown and eventually just disappeared. Cattle and horses grazed the land which the cemetery was on and the tombstones for the most part are gone. The few that remained were place in a wall as a memorial.  The land is now a large horse farm. As you can see the wall that these stones have been placed in are in the middle of a horse pasture.

It is a shame but unfortunately the cemetery was not protected. There are no records to indicate for sure who is buried in that cemetery. They just know that it was there and it was a large cemetery and none of the remains were ever moved.

Catharine Hainer was the daughter of Albert Hainer and Catharine Vollick born in 1811. Catharine Hainer married Jonas Larraway November 3, 1836. She died on Novmeber 17, 1845 at the age of 34 Years, 7 months and 27 days.
 
Catherine was the younger sister of our Henry Hainer who was the first son born of Albert and Catharine (Vollick ) Hainer born in 1789.