A bird's eye view for ye rabbits

Yours truly created a Google Map of all the hopping grounds already mentioned in this blog, and will commit to updating it on a weekly basis.

Happy Hallowe'en, everyone!

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The Potentially-infamous Jane Green and her mysterious gravestone

If ye rabbits hop south along Boggy Creek Road behind the Orlando International Airport, you will find a quiet little cemetery established in the long ago by the Locke family just past Wetherbee Road.

I discovered the place myself several years ago while attempting to locate the final resting place of my ancestor William H. Macy who lived in this neck of the woods.

I had no luck in that endeavor, but did stumble--quite literally--upon the gravestone of one Jane Green:

A rather plain name, to be sure. An even plainer stone. So you may be asking why it caught my attention beyond the fact that it had already caught the toe of my boot.

Well, at the time, I had just finished reading Mary Ida Shearhart's gripping account of the local feud between the Barber and Mizell families. ("The Way Hit Wuz," ISBN 1-866104-15-8.) Unlike many earlier writers of local history, she didn't sugar-coat things in her work. People were people even back in the 1800s, and she made it clear that some of our Central Florida pioneers did things their descendants might not necessarily consider a source of pride. One of the more notorious individuals mentioned was one Jane Green.

It seems Jane was a widow who engaged in some unsavory business practices to pay the bills. Back in the summer of 1868, she was caught luring two cowboys named Moses Barber and Ed Summerlin into the woods near Holopaw to engage in said business. For reasons I have yet to discover, Jane wasn't prosecuted for this incident. But, both Barber and Summerlin were found guilty of adultery and fined $6,000. (Sin was expensive in those days, no?!)

The genealogist in me had to follow-up on the tidbit from Shearhart, especially after stumbling across Jane's very own grave. And, once again, I uncovered a discrepancy between what was carved into stone and the surviving US census records for Orange County:

• 1880 found Jane, age 45, a widow with three daughters aged 16, 18, and 20. [Page 457a.]
• 1900 found her, age 66, living with her daughter and son-in-law Emma and Simeon Tiner. [Page 126b.]
• 1910 indices didn't include her, though I didn't try to look up the Tiners.
• 1920 found her again, this time age 95!! She was still living with her daughter and son-in-law, though their names were given as S. & Emily Tyner. [Page 197a.]

Did you spot the discrepancy?

It's not just the obvious fudging of the year of birth. 1819 on the stone. Ca 1835 according to the 1880 record. April 1834 according to the 1900 record. And, ca 1825 according to the 1920 record.

The bigger question is this: How could she be listed in the 1920 census if her gravestone says she died in 1918?!

Hmmmm.