Williams Cemetery

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Williams Cemetery Please help us preserve the beauty our loved ones deserve. The primary cost is mowing. Second is probably fence and gate maintenance.

Williams Cemetery - the resting place of Baugh, DeVore, Dickinson, Ellis, Etter, Gullett, Haley, Hockett, Jennings, McDonald, Moore, Neely, Newman, Regain, Sutton, Williams, Wood and more. Williams Cemetery, Lawrence County, Missouri
GPS Coordinates: Latitude: 37.09860, Longitude: -93.86390

The goal of this page is to remember and honor those at rest here, and solicit funds for its maintenance. This cemetery was not established as a “perpetual care” cemetery and relies on donations for upkeep and maintenance, mowing, etc. It would be great if we had sufficient funds to remedy things such as straighten stones, flag pole, repair stones. Links for more information:
- http://rodehammoore.com/
-http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~molawre2/cem/Williams/williamsindex.htm
-http://findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=cr&CRid=32303&CScn=williams&CScntry=4&CSst=26&CScnty=1451&

To research people resting here contact Al & Larry at:
[email protected]
[email protected]

10/17/2026

🪦 Meet the Residents - John James and Maud Robinson Ragain (1861 - 1901, 1866 - 1946)

🪦 Meet the Residents - John James Ragain (1861 - 1901) and Maud Robinson Ragain (1866 - 1946)Three miles southwest of to...
10/17/2026

🪦 Meet the Residents - John James Ragain (1861 - 1901) and Maud Robinson Ragain (1866 - 1946)

Three miles southwest of town the ground lies flat and good. The Ragains had been breaking it since before the war. Everybody for ten miles knew old Uncle Ed.

John James was the last of his nine. He grew up having many close friendships across town and was active in the community. At sixteen John signed the temperance pledge, number two hundred eighteen. Sallie Butrick, who signed above him, was fourteen.

Maud Robinson was carried out of Ohio too young to remember it. Her people settled into town. When she was seventeen, John James proposed. They married at ten o’clock of a Sunday morning in Judge Shipman’s front room, and because she was under age her father walked to the clerk’s office and said in front of witnesses that he allowed it.

The first child was Stella. She was sick five days. The paper reported: “In her last moments of life with uplifted hands she exclaimed papa! papa! and closed her eyes in death.” Her burial location is unaccounted for. She was four years old, and three months, and two days. Four more came after her: James “Ed,” Fay, Nellie, and Hoyt. Two boys and two girls — all lived healthy long lives.

In 1900, John went down to the cemetery and bought lot 37. He was thirty-nine. Not a year later, he fell ill. He made it to his fortieth birthday on a Monday in July, then died the next day, of a congestive chill. In his nephew’s notice: “We are indeed sorry to chronicle the death of our uncle John J. Ragain, who was our bosom companion and playmate in boyhood days.” They carried him through the gate to his own lot.

Maud was thirty-five, with four children in the kitchen. She never remarried and she thrived. Three years on, she placed fourth for number of pounds of hides brought to Mt. Vernon. Two years later, the paper had her contending for champion watermelon grower of Lawrence County, with three that went forty-eight, fifty, fifty-two pounds.

And she kept an open door. Her family kept coming to her — out to the farm for her daughter Fay’s wedding, then over to Marionville, where in 1940 seventy-six sat down to her long table on the lawn for a reunion.

In 1945, Maud fell ill. She spent time in Springfield hospital and came out of it four days before the end, to her son Edwin’s place on Route 11. She died there at five in the morning on Sunday, January 6, at seventy-nine years old, leaving nineteen grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren behind her. Her obituary stated: “She was a loving mother and was loved by all who knew her.” They brought her the twenty miles home and laid her beside John.

If you have any stories or pictures of this lovely family, please share in the comments.

10/16/2026

Meet the Residents - Elizabeth Mary Williams Wood (1844 - 1878)

10/13/2026

Meet the Residents. Alfred Ferdinand Ellis, 1860 to 1923.

🪦 Meet the Residents - Alfred Ferdinand Ellis (1860 - 1923)The Ellis place lay west of town, out toward where the Hoberg...
10/13/2026

🪦 Meet the Residents - Alfred Ferdinand Ellis (1860 - 1923)

The Ellis place lay west of town, out toward where the Hoberg depot stood. Joseph Ellis taught the first school in the Williams settlement, but the ground still had to be broken and planted, and on the Fourth of July, 1860, his last son was born on it.

He was the thirteenth. The older ones married off one at a time and the work came down to him — the corn, the stock, the fences. His father died when he was eighteen. The census taker came two years later and found him nineteen, at home, his mother a widow of sixty-one.

He kept her place until he was about twenty-five. Then he took his trade and went. He never kept a store, never worked in a town, never owned an acre. He farmed other men’s ground for wages for forty years — from Golden City for twenty then to Ottawa country in the Indian Territory at forty, and another twenty years, was hired help on a farm.

In the fall of 1886 the paper had him visiting home among friends. He was not as happy as might be, he said, and he expected he would have to go on wrestling alone with the frying pan. He never married. Then about 1920 his niece Ella Jane Bell, southwest of Golden City, took him in.

On a Saturday morning in March, 1923, he went out to prune C. H. Wright’s orchard. Wright told him not to — too cold, he said, for a man to expose himself. He went anyway, early. He was in the top of a tree when the pain took him, and he came down that tree as fast as a man of sixty-two can come down a tree, and by the time his feet found the ground he was barely alive. Wright ran to him. He died before they got him to the house.

They brought him home the next day and laid him in his mother’s lot with no headstone. The Herald printed a card that week from the Bells and from Jim Etter, thanking the neighbors for their kindness at the burial of their beloved uncle.

His mother’s grave is unmarked too. No one living knows where either of them lies.

We are looking for someone with access to a lidar machine to find them.

🪦 Meet the Residents - Elizabeth Mary Williams Wood (1844 - 1878)Three miles west of Mount Vernon, Samuel Williams took ...
10/07/2026

🪦 Meet the Residents - Elizabeth Mary Williams Wood (1844 - 1878)

Three miles west of Mount Vernon, Samuel Williams took up land in 1831 and farmed it the rest of his life, and a half acre of it had been a burying ground since the forties. His daughter Elizabeth Mary was born on that farm in the spring of 1844, and she is in that half acre now.

She was one of sixteen, and a twin — her brother Samuel came the same day. Her mother said no traveler was ever turned away from their door hungry, and the cooking fell where it always fell. She had been raising children for years before she had any.

She was seventeen when the war came into the county. She married at twenty-five, which was late.

On the seventh of April, 1869, she married James Marion Wood and went down the road to his father's house. Allie Woods already had that kitchen. The census taker gave both women the same work, keeping house, and drew a line through Elizabeth's columns for land and money. Her husband had six hundred dollars of ground of his own, waiting.

A son was born and died there on the fourth of March, 1870. Five days later her father signed the deed that gave the burying ground away for a dollar.

Rosa came the next summer and lived thirteen months. Then Samuel Commodore in 1875, who was given both his grandfathers' names. Then John F. in 1877.

She took to her bed about the first of July, 1878. Two weeks before the end her doctor had her carried the three miles back up the road to her mother's house. She died there on the twelfth of August, of general debility, at thirty-four. The paper said she "died perfectly at ease and expressed herself willing to go."

They laid her beside her two babies in her father's ground, and John F. followed in November, twenty-one months old. Her husband went off to the Ozarks and came back in 1910 to lie at her side.

Samuel Commodore, the one who lived, lasted until 1954.

The stone over James is of the Federal pattern. He served in Company E of the Sixteenth Missouri Infantry, which was Confederate, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans have approved a correct marker for him. We are planning a dedication at the graveyard in the spring, and we would like his descendants there. If you come down from this family — Wood, Hemphill, Corn, Ellis, Edel, Short, McMillen, Serzen or others — please contact us at [email protected].

09/27/2026

🪦 Meet the Residents - John Nelson Parrish (1827 - 1915)

🪦 Meet the Residents - Cynthia Ann "Cynthiana" Moore Etter Ellis (1818 - 1892)Her brother went first. In 1838 John Willi...
09/27/2026

🪦 Meet the Residents - Cynthia Ann "Cynthiana" Moore Etter Ellis (1818 - 1892)

Her brother went first. In 1838 John Williams Moore rode eight hundred miles out of East Tennessee and built a cabin on the river west of Mount Vernon. Five years later his sister came after him, and she did not come light.

Cynthia Ann Moore was born in East Tennessee on the tenth of October, 1818, to John Moore and Elizabeth Williams. The Williams in her mother's name is the name this ground carries. At eighteen she married Thomas Kearnes Etter.

She came into Missouri in 1843 with four children under the age of seven and another one coming. Thomas lived fourteen months in the new country. He was thirty when he died, in July of 1844. Maria was born the following January. On the twentieth of April, 1845, nine months after the funeral, Cynthia married Joseph Ellis, the schoolmaster on Spring River. She was twenty-six, and she had five children to keep.

Eight more were born to her. Thirteen in all, under two surnames, in one house — and in that house hung a printed Family Register with every one of them written into it, Etter and Ellis together on the one sheet.

Not all of them stayed. James Etter died at ten in 1851. Joseph's namesake died at eight in 1862. Frances Jane was four when she died in 1868.

Joseph went to the war in Company B of the Fifteenth Missouri Cavalry, the same company her nephew Black Moore rode with. He came home, and he died in 1878.

When the census taker came in 1880 he found her sixty-one and head of her own house, with Alfred, the last boy, still at home. He wrote her name down Cynthiana.

In August of 1890 she filed for a widow's pension on Joseph's service, and the government granted it.

She died on the thirteenth of March, 1892, in her seventy-fourth year, out in Jasper County where her children had gone. They brought her home to Williams. John lived to be eighty-four, and Maria, who never saw her father at all, lived to ninety-three.

There is no stone for her. The first burial book burned, and no one living knows the place, though the family has always believed she lies beside Thomas Etter, or in her children's Etter, Ellis plots.

Thirteen names on one sheet of paper. She made one family out of two.

09/25/2026

🪦 Meet the Residents - William Grant "Buttermilk" Moore (1864 - 1941) and Ettie May Parrish Moore (1865 - 1949)

🪦 Meet the Residents - John Nelson Parrish (1827 - 1915)In Knox County, Ohio there were eighty acres that Enoch Parrish ...
09/25/2026

🪦 Meet the Residents - John Nelson Parrish (1827 - 1915)

In Knox County, Ohio there were eighty acres that Enoch Parrish bought from the government in 1823 — paid for at the land office at Chillicothe, with James Monroe's name on the paper. His son John Nelson Parrish was born on it on the twenty-fifth of March, 1827.

Enoch had gone out as a private in the Ohio militia in the War of 1812, and he did not live to see his son grown. When John was nine they read the will in the courthouse at Mount Vernon, Ohio, and it left a wife, five sons, seven daughters and the eighty acres.

The land was to be held whole until the youngest came of age. Then the sons were to have it, and each of the seven daughters twenty-five dollars out of her brothers' pockets. Eighty acres divided five ways comes to sixteen acres a man, with thirty-five dollars owing on it, and no man could live on that.

He came of age about 1848 and married Melissa Ann Baugh the following April. Sylvia was born to them there. Then they went west to Astoria, in Fulton County, Illinois, where he let go of land and took up the tanner's trade.

In July of 1863 a provost marshal's clerk came through Astoria writing down the men. John N. Parrish, thirty-six, tanner, born in Ohio. He was put in the second class, married men past thirty-five, to be called only if the first class ran out. The column headed Former Military Service was left blank beside his name, and it stayed blank.

Ettie May was born at Astoria in 1865. Melissa died in 1872, and the girls were left to their father.

Sylvia married Wallace Holten the next year, and when the Holtens came down to Missouri, John came with them. Ettie May stayed behind a while, keeping house for strangers at fifteen, then she came too, and in 1886 she married Buttermilk Moore and went up the hill above Spring River.

He was eighty-eight when he died, on the tenth of August, 1915, in a daughter's house. Buttermilk went in to answer the questions, and when the clerk asked the name of John's mother, he did not know it.

They buried him the next day at Williams, in the Moore end of the ground, a long way from the eighty acres, among people who made room for him.

Address

Lawrence 1105 And Missouri Highway V
Mount Vernon, MO
65712

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