The family story is that 3-year-old William Klein was kidnapped in Cincinnati and has never been found. By thinking outside the box and using research tools, I could not find the birth, kidnapping or death of William Klein. Was it just another family story passed down through the generations?
After exhausting all the routes I could think of, I put the quest aside for a year. Then I looked again in Ancestry and Family Search. Nothing. For some reason, I scrolled a line past the last William Klein, where I usually stopped because the dates didn’t apply – William Kleine, born 1853, died 1856. My William Klein, with an e at the end! How many times had I missed it?
Shame on me. I tell family finders to write down all possible spellings for a last name first, even if it’s a common name like Smith, Brown, etc. Klein is a common German name and I should have tried the possible spellings: Kline, Cline and Kleine.
So with this new find, I continued the search. It made no sense that if he had been kidnapped and never found out that he would have his date of death – September 29, 1856. With this little information, I found William on Find A Grave, buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. But no other family member – yes I tried all the spellings – was buried there. My detective work was done and the case closed.
At this point, William has become personal to me. More than a 3x great-uncle. I thought of the little boy buried alone in the big cemetery.
I contacted the Spring Grove Cemetery and for $ 5 I obtained the report of his burial. It showed the location of the plot, the date of his death, the cost of the burial, and the cause of death – the croup. Case closed. William had not been kidnapped and now I could put an end to this handwritten mention in the family registers, “kidnapped and never found”.
In my excitement, I missed an annotation at the bottom of the cemetery map. “Body missing from the grave.” This was the “kidnapped”.
Now the case was reopened. Detective again, I thought of all the scenarios for a body missing from the grave. Didn’t the parents have the money to pay for the burial? Did they want him to be buried at his home in the garden? Or was he the victim of grave robbers?
I tend to think it was the latter. I checked and learned that the Cincinnati area and northern Kentucky had several medical schools in the 1850s. Grave raiders weren’t always looking for jewelry that people were buried in, but also bodies. that could be sold to medical schools.
There is no way to know the whole story of William. I look at the map of the lush green Spring Grove cemetery and the location of its grounds. Someday I will visit and lay a flower on the grave of the forgotten little boy.
“Genealogy is more than names and dates. It is learning the culture of the days when your ancestors lived.
Becky McCreary is a member of the Southern Arizona Genealogy Society. Contact her at [email protected] or visit the company’s website at azsags.org, where her columns are archived. Articles may not be reprinted without written permission from the author.