Rebecca’s Grave Stone
2010
Sarah Rebecca Watrous married Clarence Roland Gittings in St. Louis, Missouri when she was forty-three years of age. It was the first marriage for her and the second for him. They built a home on land where her childhood home had once stood in the tiny farming community of Terre Haute in Henderson County, Illinois. Her father Jerome sold the land to Clarence. When Clarence died in 1907, Sarah Rebecca remained unmarried until her own death in 1926. While Clarence is buried in the Terre Haute City Cemetery in a grave marked with a stone, Sarah Rebecca died in Long Beach, California and was cremated and her ashes interred there. However, upon her husband Clarence’ death in 1907 she bought and placed a matching stone made for herself in anticipation of her burial next to him in the future. Underneath the stone is a burial plot without the remains of Sarah Rebecca Watrous Gittings. We assume that by the time she died, there was no one to bring her home. She had no children. Her parents and only brother were deceased and although she had been close to her brother’s son Earl Pancake Watrous and her husband’s sons, her ashes remained in California.