Finding Aunt Mary E. (Hamilton) Jones grave
Glen Hamilton
On June 26, 2026, my son Alex Hamilton and brother-in-law Greg Hazard and I searched in the rain in Athens, Illinois, for Aunt Mary's long forgotten grave. We were successful, thanks to the eagle eye of Alex and then digging up a gravestone that was 90% buried and broken in the sod of the cemetery.
The stone (the only Jones we found in the oldest sections of the cemetery) reads: "MARY Wife of James M. Jones. DIED." Unfortunately, in recent years the grave stone has been run over and broken, likely by lawn care equipment. It is rapidly becoming completely buried. We prolonged that fate a few years.
Mary was born circa 1827 in Western New York State, the 5th of 9 (perhaps 10) children of John and Altha (Judd) Hamilton.
She married James Matthew Jones, a young farmer born 1819 in Kentucky, in Menard County, Illinois on Sept. 6, 1846. They had five children (George A, Eliza Frances, Robert Soprana, Anna Elizabeth and Lydia E) between 1847 and 1863.
Mary died sometime between 1863 and 1869 and was buried in the Joel Hall Cemetery near Athens, Menard County, Illinois. The family was living in Athens, Menard, Illinois in the 1860 census and by the 1870 census the family was still in Athens but Mary was gone. Her brother, James M. Hamilton's 1869 will, also spoke of her heirs and of her in the past tense.
If I had to guess, I suspect she died from complications from childbirth of her last child, Lydia, born in 1863.
The image at the top of her stone is a weeping willow tree, a common gravestone motif of the late 18th and early to mid-19th centuries. The weeping willow is a symbol of grief, eternal life, and resurrection. If you cut it down, it vigorously grows back. We had large beautiful weeping willows in my childhood home in Elmer City, WA that unfortunately overhung the street and interfered with the power lines. My folks (likely the power company) would cut them down to stumps and they would still flourish and rapidly grow back up.
Links:
https://sites.rootsweb.com/~ilmaga/menard/cemetery/cem_hall.html