A lost cousin is found...

A while back, I wrote about an accident in which one of my great-grandfathers was killed when the truck he was driving was hit by a railroad locomotive. I recently learned some things -

- one of those things is just where this accident occurred. If you look at the scene closely, you will notice that there are two tracks at this location.



I found a dusty old book which states, that the Camden And Burlington County Railroad (later the Pennsylvania Railroad's Pemberton Branch) was only double tracked between Smithville and Birmingham, New Jersey. This is the branch line that took hundreds of thousands of troops to Fort Dix during WWI and WWII.

I also found out where my great-grandfather was building a summer cottage. I've marked the street map I got from Google Maps below. If you click on it to "biggify" it, you will see two streets named Railroad Street and Indian Trail. These streets ran next to the tracks back when there were tracks there (they were removed twenty or thirty years ago).



On the satellite version of the map, I've drawn the length of railroad that was double tracked. The scene of my great-grandfather's accident is somewhere along that red line where a road crosses it.



This last picture was taken in 1961 and shows the remains of the Ewansville's train station. The second track has already been removed (around 1958)- and the trees and plant life is once again reclaiming what it can from man's impermanent works. Indian Trail Road is just to the left.



There are many visual "hints" of similarity between the first and last pictures.

And now for the what gave me goose-bumps. The main road in the area, Route 206 used to (and in my memory) go under a railroad bridge (removed in 1987) as it heads south from Ewansville to Vincentown - I've been down this road countless times from a tender age of weeks-old to the present - this is the route I take to go to the New Jersey shore. Could this have been the grade crossing? When was the bridge put in and the grade separated? I do not know - but the accident happened near here.

The second goose-bump causing result of my research into this accident was two-fold, I discovered the accident occurred November 9, 1924 around 8:30 AM. While trying to uncover this date with near desperate and quickly growing frustration, I encountered a family tree for the McClurken family on the MyHeritage website. And lo and behold, I discovered the date of death of my great-grandfather William Spence McClurken.

Having been stymied, mostly because every other male McClurken in my family tree name is "William" and every other female's name is "Margaret", I grew dizzy in my efforts to keep who is (or was) who straight. And there, on this MyHeritage website, was the many generations of Williams and Margarets all sorted out and neatly delineated. This glorious family tree is the work of the grand-daughter of my great-grandfather's brother.

I've never known any of my Grandmother's family beyond her brother and his children. I was beyond elated. And just to cap things off - she has a large picture of my great-grandmother's family - and once the rush of the holiday season is over - she will send me a reproduction of it!

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Today, I also heard one my college buddies had a heart attack over the weekend shoveling snow, and underwent triple-bypass surgery. My thoughts and prayers are with him and his family as well as with Rita of Soul Comfort's Corner's daughter-in-law, whose mother was recently diagnosed with late stage cancer.

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows."
- Helen Keller