My brother, Douglas Hall Humes
(originally written July 13, 2019)

Burial records for North Cedar Hill Cemetery

I finally found my brother last night, and his name is Douglas. Douglas Hall Humes. I am Douglas Palmer Humes. We share a first name, and a last name, and we each have a family name as our middle name. I had known him as “Dean” for all of my life, but as it turns out, that would have been my name, if he had lived.

Ancestry.com is the online genealogy site that is connecting the world by compiling historical records and making them searchable. I have belonged for about 20 years, and the site has enabled me to reach way back in history to find my ancestors. One of their search tools is “hints”, records that seem to have similar information to people in your tree. Last night, after a session searching for something else, I noticed a “hint” for my name. It is unusual to have a hint for someone alive, as the records are mostly historical and more remote. The latest US census records, for instance, are from 1940. But there it was - a hint - for me - from 1954. An old cemetery burial record. And the name given was Douglas Hall Humes.

Hall is a family name, my mother’s name: Mildred Hall. The Halls came from England to Pennsylvania in 1684, and were the early settlers of Tacony in Philadelphia. They were initially Quakers, but were convinced by an early minister, and the church they belonged to was converted en masse, and became Trinity Oxford Church, still open for the business of the Lord on Sundays. Hundreds of years later, my mother and father, newlyweds, lived in the vicinity, and when they began having children, we were all baptized at the neighborhood church they attended, Trinity Oxford. My mother never knew that her ancestors were some of the founding members of this church, and are likely buried in the old cemetery that surrounds it. I found this all out years later. The information existed, buried in old records, but it took someone with interest in the subject to dig it out. One Sunday, Barb and I attended services there, and I saw the baptismal font where I was likely baptized, and where brother Douglas Hall Humes would have been baptized. Above the altar is painted this verse: “Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge from One Generation to Another”.

Trinity Oxford Church, a refuge for generations.

I don’t know that the Lord was a refuge for my mother. She suffered an enormous amount of loss in her life. At age 5 she lost her mother; at age 15, her father. At age 18, she lost her beloved brother Samuel Hall to the war. Later in life, she lost her oldest brother, too young at 52. Her only sister died at 52 as well. So Mom had lost her whole family, two parents and three siblings, before she turned 50. I imagine that she and the Lord had some heated conversations about this topic.

And of course she suffered one other painful loss. In 1954, at age 28, she was pregnant with her second child, a child that she carried to full term. She went to Episcopal Hospital, where Dr. John H. Dugger was there to help with the delivery. A former professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Jefferson Medical College, he was on staff at the Hospital. There was a problem with the delivery, and the child did not live. I don’t know the details of what happened that day. If I had ever asked, I think Mom would have told me the story. But at what price to her? I would never want to open up the floodgates to the grief that she carried in her heart from a lifetime of loss.

My three siblings and I knew that there was this brother who we never met. We were told his name was “Dean”. That’s all we knew. A baby that dies at birth does not leave much else to remember him by - just a name. Dean Humes.

Over the years I have looked for records on Dean’s birth and death, without success. Perhaps a stillborn child creates no paper trail, no birth certificate, no death certificate. No trace other than in the memories of those who waited for nine long months to meet him, only to be devastated by his loss. In my mother’s papers, I did find several condolence notes that she kept, and one of them bore a late April date, though no year. Brother Dave was born in 1951, and I was born in 1955, so Dean had to have died in April of 1952-54.

And then last night I found that a record had been created at North Cedar Hill cemetery in April of 1954. I know that cemetery - have biked every inch of it looking for various ancestors buried there. Samuel Humes was my immigrant ancestor on my father’s side, a Civil War soldier. I had found his grave site there years ago - his gravestone broken off to the ground; and so I ordered a new one, had it installed, and then invited his descendants to a rededication ceremony there, where a bugler played Taps and we remembered and honored our dead.

There are other Douglas Humes in the world, but the hint I received, with the April 1954 date, the Hall family name, and the burial at a cemetery where my family members were buried, was no coincidence. This was the burial record for our brother Dean. But he was not named Dean. When my father filled out the form for the cemetery that asked for the baby’s name, he filled in the name that my mother and he had chosen, Douglas Hall Humes.

My parents liked the name Douglas, so much so that they gave it to the next child that came along - me - the following year. But they could not give me the same middle name. Douglas Hall Humes had been a vital part of their lives for nine months, and that name was his sole identity. Giving it to someone else would seem to deny his existence. And so I received a new name, Douglas Palmer Humes, the “Palmer” being my grandmother’s maiden name.

Mom and me, Douglas Palmer Humes, in 1955.

I was born on my mother’s 30th birthday. My reign as “newest” was short-lived. A daughter was born a year to the day later on my mother’s 31st birthday, Kimberly Hall Humes. And so the two favored names were used -Douglas and Hall. Sister Dana came along a few years later. The Humes family was complete at four children.

Kimberly Hall Humes

But for my parents, there must have always been a family of five children. They had been emotionally invested in Douglas Hall Humes from the time they knew of that pregnancy. I have just been through this process with my daughter and her pregnancy. It was a difficult pregnancy - the danger of an early delivery at 5 months; hospitalization and then low activity and bed rest for the last 4 months; and the problems posed by a potential breach birth. A child does not come into existence when it is born; from conception it takes on a life of its own, with a beating heart and a full slate of genetic traits, and a family of people waiting and praying for its healthy delivery.

1961 Family portrait, with one missing.

Several days before I found that old burial record, I became a grandfather, to Keena Hall Kogan. I had not known the name - my daughter did not tell me. But she had selected the Hall name - if the baby was a girl. And so in the space of a few days, I learned the name of my brother, and my granddaughter. They both were named for my mother’s family, the Halls, who are as old as Pennsylvania.

I have unfinished business at North Cedar Hill Cemetery. There are other family members buried in the same plot as Samuel Humes. I have always intended to order a second gravestone, with those names. But I will add a new listing as well - in place of “Infant Humes”, I will have carved “Douglas Hall Humes”.

Now that I know your name, I will make sure that the world knows your name as well. And you will be remembered, from one generation to another.