YorksPast

The life of Lila Fourhman-Shaull was celebrated yesterday by a large gathering in Founders Hall of the York County History Center. It was a fitting service, with poignant remembrances by those closest to Lila; which undeniably connected with everyone who had the pleasure to know her.

I received an E-mail several days ago about a two-year old series of blog posts. The message was of the kind I normally would, in-turn, show to Lila, because she had shared a key bit of information, which got me through a brick wall in solving that Casper Spangler graveyard mystery.

While researching those posts, I showed Lila all my finds and asked if she could offer any tips, which were often pearls of wisdom! Most often besides the tips, with little effort, Lila knew the exact place where additional information resided in the History Center collections.

This case was a little different. Lila remembered, someone sharing a relevant newspaper article, years ago, during one of her family history talks around the county. After some thought, Lila recalled where the newspaper clipping was at her home. She had been planning on doing additional research on it; to determine where to file it in the collections.

Lila’s ability to make connections was amazing. She often connected people working on similar projects, and/or it was the connection to a resource within the History Center. However in this instance, Lila connected me to a 1927 newspaper clipping; which she had in a collection at home.

That newspaper article, proved the key clue in solving the Casper Spangler graveyard mystery, which I wrote about in the following series of posts:

Digging up human bones in Springettsbury
Discover the Graveyard of earliest Spangler in York County
Spanglers in York: Plantation of earliest family member
Ensuing burials of colonial Spangler bodies

Lila was the foremost graveyard authority in York County. She did the tough site searches; on her own time. Lila visited all but a handful of the hundreds of cemeteries and, the often hidden, family graveyards throughout York County; in order to pinpoint their precise location and provide updated details. Lila’s marked up cemetery maps and indexes remain invaluable to family history researchers visiting the History Center.

Click on this LINK for a yorkblog.com Full View of the original photos in this post if details are cut off in the cropping of the photos, or if any photos or links have been removed from the ydr.com site.