Cemeteries and Tombstones

Prospect Methodist Church, near both Dresden and Adamsville, Ohio, was founded by the Thomas family. Many members of the family are buried here:


The Gadd family worshipped at nearby Salem Methodist Church. The Salem parish was devastated by strip mining, and the church building was demolished in the 1960s. Still, the graves remain:




If you consult the family tree, you will see that Anna H. (Kinney) and Winfield S. Gadd are the parents of Ada Ellen Gadd, who married my grandfather, Ira Wilbur Thomas.

Although at least one family tree posted on the internet identifies Glenford as a son of Anna and Winfield, he was actually the child of their youngest daughter, Dorothy, and her first husband, Virgil Spragg. (Obviously Anna, born in 1854, could not have given birth in 1916!) Glenford was raised by Anna and Winfield after Dorothy and Virgil divorced. Glenford was only a teenager when he died in a car accident.

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them--aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.
--from "During Wind and Rain," by Thomas Hardy