Gearing up for next week

Things have been a little quiet here lately mainly because I've been enjoying a little downtime. There was no ProGen assignment this month and I haven't started with CD 2 of the NGS Home Course yet. So I've just been doing a little prep work for a few things I've got planned for next week. I'll have about 2 1/2 days to run around a do a little record retrieval and brief research. It's not long but I'm excited. I'm going to stop in Kentland, IN to pick up the marriage record for my paternal Great Grandparents on one day, then on the next day I'm taking a longer trip out to Rockville, Parke Co., IN to look for land records and possibly, if I have time, Probate/Court records. The last day will be spent in Chicago looking up divorce records and possibly some vital records that I haven't been able to get yet. So it's going to be a jam packed few days, can't wait!

In the meantime, I've been biding my time visiting a couple of area cemeteries looking for some family graves and names from my father's side. I succeeded in finding Julius Bolda (1868/1869-1915) and his wife, Marie (Ptak) (1868/1869-1943) at St Joseph Catholic Cemetery in a suburb of Chicago. Julius and Mare were my paternal Grandmother's maternal Grandparents. But they weren't the only ones who showed up in the double-sided plot; Grandma's maternal Grandfather was there too as were a couple of other relatives from both sides of the family. Seeing him there, just outside of Chicago, opened up a few mysteries for me to try to unravel.

John Kleinert (c.1859?-1926), like the Boldas, was an immigrant to this country. Naturalization records still need to be consulted, but according to the 1900 census, he arrived in 1882 from Germany. He settled in Kankakee Co., IL (far south of Chicago) and married Josephine Dellibac (1868/69-1937), a first generation American with French Canadian roots, on 22 Dec 1885. He states that he is 27 y/o, she 17 y/o, and it is the first marriage for both of them. They are seen together on the 1900 census and then things change a bit. In the 1910 census Josephine is found living in Chicago working as a live-in servant. John is not with her, in fact, she marries John Dettman later in 1910. So what happened to John? Did he die? We thought so but hadn't gotten to persue it. Seeing his tombstone at St Joseph's changed that theory because two things were amiss with the tombstone:
1-his date of birth is about 10 years younger than his age on his marriage license and on the 1900 census
2-the tombstone dates that he died in 1926 though we hadn't seen him with Josephine in 1910 and she was even remarried that year

Here's the stone:

So could the John Kleinert buried at St Joseph's be a different John Kleinert? Not likely since he was quite literally, buried with the Boldas, the parents of his son's wife, his in-laws. Also, there was no other John Kleinert who was of this age and certainly not another one who was so intimately acquainted with the Boldas that he should be buried with them. In fact, we even have a picture of John Kleinert standing with the (presumably) newly widowed Marie Bolda. So we dug a little deeper and got the death record for John Kleinert who died in 1926....