Trivial Trivia - taking trivia to new levels

[L Verge]

One frustrating thing about Surratt Senior's funeral is that there is no known record of where he is buried! The undertaker was a Mr. Robinson of the nearby T.B. area, and his grandson told us in the 1960s that the records were thrown out over the years, but that he thought the burial was in the church cemetery at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Piscataway. However, the church had a fire that destroyed records.

To complicate things further, Surratt descendants have told us that their patriarch hated the Catholic Church and never converted. If he is at Piscataway, he will be outside the cemetery walls since non-Catholics would never have been buried in blessed ground. The descendants think he was buried on his wife's family's old farm which was taken over during WWII for what is now Joint Base Andrews.

I think I may have posted this before, but I did contact the base and talked to a gentleman who had been in on the process of the government taking over five villages, locating graves, and returning them to families or re-burying them at a tiny Methodist church in what had been the village of Meadows. That church still is used on the base, but no records bear the name of Surratt.

In the 1840s, as a young wife, Mary Surratt rode horseback to solicit funds for establishing a Catholic church near the area where the family first lived. The church still exists, St. Ignatius Oxon Hill, and Mary's mother was buried there in 1878. If hubby had converted to Catholicism, I would think that cemetery would be a logical resting place for him.

One thing I have never pursued is finding a family graveyard for the Neales. John Harrison Surratt, Sr. was raised as a foster child by the Neales and inherited (and then sold) their lands, some of which now lie within the D.C. boundaries. I'm betting the Neales had a family graveyard that has long since disappeared, or that no one has searched Episcopal records in churches near their old farm (either Maryland or D.C.). Mary Surratt was left with about $3500 in debts when her husband died, so the chances of him ever having a tombstone are slim.

The Surratts were Protestant Episcopal in the generations leading up to his marriage with Mary Jenkins (who was also Protestant Episcopal until educated at a Catholic girls' school), and their names, as well as Jenkinses, appear on the records of St. John's Broad Creek - a church frequented by George Washington when he crossed over the Potomac from Mount Vernon to visit Maryland friends. Foster mother Neale was converted to the Catholic Church on her deathbed, but there is a note that to the effect that "it might not take since she was a Protestant all of her life."

It seems very strange that we have found no written record as to where John Harrison Surratt, Sr. is buried. Another mystery to solve.