I just ran across a third cousin who died at age 33 in 2003. Wow. What happened? Sometimes I get lucky with Findagrave entries--when some kind soul has attached the deceased's obituary to the record of the cemetery information. But no luck for this cousin. Ancestry searches of newspaper records also failed to turn up anything, and since his obituary would have been published over ten years ago--beyond the point most newspaper archives reach--there really isn't any way to track it down. Not unless I trundle out to Blue Earth County to physically search newspaper microfiche or computer records.
I tried Google and Bing. No luck. My cousin isn't searchable.
So I'm left with a mystery. What could have happened to this very young man? About the only things I can rule out at this point are his being murdered or dying in a car accident or some sort of bizarre accidental death. Any of those possibilities would probably have popped up on Google. So illness? Common accident, like a fall? Suicide?
I've run across several of these sad mysteries in my research, and each one bothers me. How can there be no way to discover what happened to this person? How can there be nothing left of a life but a birth record and a death record? Where's the good stuff? Where's the life story? There must have been one--maybe not an exciting one, but every life has something worth remembering, right?
Guess I'll go break out my Band Perry CD and play "If I Die Young" and have a drink in this lost cousin's honor. To the sharp knife of a short life! Salud!
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