Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 139, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 June 1912 — SEEKS GRAVE DEED [ARTICLE]

SEEKS GRAVE DEED

Death Near to Aged New Yorker He Requests Lot. • Tells Court Son Was Victim of Maine Disaster and Gave Document to Fiancee—Now He Wants It Back. New York, —John Kelly, bent over a cane by the snows of eighty-sixe winters, pleaded in the Gates Avenue Police court, Brooklyn, for a summons that he might force his son’s sweetheart toZgive him the deed to his grave, sojthat when death arrives he will not be burled in the potters field. He lives near Tlllary and Johnson streets. Numbers- he cannot remember. He had eleven sons, he said, ten of whom “went to the bad." In 1869 he purchased a deed to a grave in Holy Cross cemetery, and many years after gave it to John, Jr.,

tfce eleventh and only good son, to keep for him. They lived together until 1897, he said, when the SpanishAmerican war broke out and his son joined the navy. He was assigned to the battleship Maine and was on board when that vessel was blown up. John never came back. His name was among the missing. Perhaps his bones were among those brought home for burial recently. Before John left home he gave the deed and other family papers to his sweetheart, Miss Lizzie McShean, who, he old man said, lives at Franklin and Myrtle avenues. Feeling that he is getting too old to sthnd many winters such as the one he has just gone through, Kelly said he went to the girl and asked her to give him the deed. “She told me that if I did not keep away from bothering her about deeds and such , things she . would throw

scalding water on me,” lamented the man to the clerk. He was given a summons and tottered out of court to regain his grave.