Solomon Staley endured. After three burials and 129 years in a grassy grave marked only by a number, sons and daughters -- three to four generations removed -- recovered his life story and honored him with a gravestone.
During his 68 years, Staley had moved from Ohio to Iowa to Nebraska, lost two wives while they were giving birth to two of his six children, and helped protect residents of Hampton, Iowa, as the town's first elected sheriff.
No one knows why he moved to Nebraska. And they don't know the circumstances that led to his committal to the Nebraska Asylum for the Insane in Lincoln, shortly before his death on Nov. 16, 1885, possibly from dysentery.
What they know is that Staley was one of those buried in a field adjacent to the Lincoln Regional Center. His grave was marked only by a number until Patty Jackson, a descendent of his oldest son, and Fay Fisher, who traces back to his youngest daughter, began working to change that.
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Their quest brought together seven distant relatives Monday morning from North Dakota, Minnesota and Omaha, families who had never seen each other, but who were joined by long threads of lineage.
A dozen of his descendents from all over the country had corresponded, and then pooled their money to pay $568.68 for an engraved headstone, shipped from Fargo, North Dakota, and installed courtesy of the state.
Jackson, who did much of the organization of the family's genealogy, learned not only about her great-great-grandfather's life -- born in Ohio and part of the pioneer movement west, ending in northern Nebraska near Ponca and then Lincoln -- but also about some of his indignities.
According to a story in a Dec. 2, 1886, edition of the Lincoln Daily State Journal, two doctors were brought to trial, and found not guilty of robbing Staley's grave after his death and burial, and using his body for "dissection, surgery, anatomical experiment" and other purposes. Â
The doctors claimed they obtained Staley's body legitimately, purchasing it for $40.
His body was then found in a small building in Lincoln, taken back to the hospital and reburied, only to be removed again, dressed properly and then reburied, so that "if friends called for it they would find it in a respectable condition."Â
Staley, his family and others from the Hampton, Iowa, area moved to Nebraska after the Civil War. Ponca was said to be a roaring western town which by 1870 had both busy steamboat traffic and a stagecoach twice a week. By 1881, the estimated population was 1,200.
No medical records were found, but it seems likely that Staley was committed to the Lincoln asylum for a reason other than mental illness, said Fay Fisher, Staley's great-grandson.
On Monday, the Regional Center provided a memorial service at the gravesite with violin music by activity specialist Kathy Borg, prayers and a blessing of the headstone by religious coordinator Rachel Johnson and words about Staley by Jackson.
After the service, the Regional Center provided lunch for the family.
Staley is one of 467 former Regional Center residents buried in the small Calvert Street cemetery, but one of only a handful who have engraved headstones. On Friday, in an effort to remember those who died at the hospital, the Regional Center had recognized those buried there with a ceremony that included reading the former residents' names.
Jackson explained why it was important to honor this long-ago patriarch of the family. Her great-grandmother was born in Nebraska, she said.
"I never knew her," she said, "but I have pictures of her with my brother, four-generation pictures. Those kinds of things, that's pretty hard to let go of."
Lost family connections can be recovered.
"She was really important to my mother, and I assume that (Staley) was somebody who was important to her."