Robert Larue Murray

Driving in the rural Elimsport area where Nana was born and grew up triggers memories for her.  During a recent drive, she showed me where the old black house, her birthplace, had stood.  The house has been gone for a long time, but Nana’s memories remain.  A few miles away, we drove past Maple Hill Church.  This quaint country church, surrounded by a rusting iron fence, has been there as long as I can remember.  Beside the church is a cemetery with moss-covered markers etched with names eroded by decades of brutal Pennsylvania weather.

Nana and I have driven past this church and cemetery hundreds of times when visiting my brother Bill.  As we drove by the church cemetery this time, Nana said, “That’s where Grace’s baby boy is buried.”  I practically swerved the car off the road.  “I didn’t know Aunt Grace had a baby boy that died.  Did that happen before Jack was born?”  Grace, one of Nana’s older sisters, had one child that I knew about – my cousin Jack. 

“Oh this happened long before she married Tom and before Jack was born.  She had the baby while we still lived in the old black house.”  I did some mental calculations.  Grace was eleven years older than Nana.  Nana moved from the old black house when she was only five or six years old.  That meant Aunt Grace must have been only fifteen or sixteen when she had the baby. 

I had lots of questions for Nana, “Who was the father?  How did Mother and Dad Tilburg react to the pregnancy and the baby?”  Nana had few answers.  She did know the father was a local boy.  They named the baby Robert Larue Murray.  Robert was chosen for Grace and Nana's brother John’s middle name and Larue Murray was the name of the baby’s father.  At only five years old, Nana’s clearest memory was Grace bathing the baby on the kitchen table.  There were no fancy baby bathtubs back then, just an old basin and wash cloth and towel.  Nana kept saying, “He was the prettiest baby.”  I pictured the baby with Aunt Grace’s coal black hair and smiling eyes. 

Nana said the baby died suddenly at only a few months old.  No one knew why he died.  The  family was so poor they couldn’t afford a cemetery plot or marker for the grave.  They buried the baby on the gravesite of Robert Tilburg, a relative of Dad Tilburg. 

Grace died almost 20 years ago.  I asked Nana if she ever heard her talk about the baby.  She said, "No,Grace never talked about it and neither did anyone else in the family."

With no marker on the tiny grave, there’s no record of the baby’s birth and death - nothing to show for the short life of Robert Larue Murray but Nana's childhood memory.

 

 

Tom and Grace Crain and son Jack