Mohawk Cemetery Records, Warsaw, Coshocton County, Ohio
2010
We knew that direct ancestor William Pancake was buried where the Mohawk Methodist Church once stood because his obituary told us so. We assumed that his wife Mary Crawford was buried with him. We didn’t expect to find three grandchildren of William and Mary Pancake whose names we had never seen. Emma and Pauline were the daughters of Samuel Crawford Pancake and his wife Catharine Darling. They were the sisters of direct ancestor Edith Glendora Pancake Watrous. How heartbreaking to lose two little daughters and granddaughters to death in just four weeks time. Just two days before the death of little Emma, their uncle William Pancake Junior died as well. He had contracted an illness during his service for the Union during the Civil War. After a year in a military hospital he returned home. He died soon after in the town of Warsaw, Coshocton County, Ohio. Thus, the Pancake Family mourned for many lost lives. William Pancake Senior mourned for his son and namesake. William mourned for his two little granddaughters. Samuel Crawford Pancake, our direct ancestor, mourned for the loss of his daughters and his brother. William junior’s wife and three little daughters mourned for their father and their two cousins.
Only two years passed before the family mourned again. William Pancake Senior died and was buried with his son, Emma and Pauline and a little grandson who died before his father went to war. He was Oliver. He was not even two. Mary Crawford Pancake lived on. Her daughter-in-law Maria, wife of her deceased son William cared for her three daughters until she, too, passed away in 1871. In about 1876, Samuel Crawford Pancake and his large family migrated from Ohio to Blandinsville, Illinois. His mother Mary stayed behind where she died in 1880. She was buried with everyone else. The graves were marked and the stones set. These many members of the same family rest in the old churchyard of the first Methodist Church in the area.
Somewhere nearby, most likely in the very same place, is the burial place of Jane Pancake Thompson. She was the oldest daughter of William and Mary Crawford Pancake. She died in childbirth many years earlier. Her daughters were mentioned in their grandfather’s Will of 1867 along with the daughters of Jane’s brother William Junior. By 1880, our ancestor Samuel Pancake had lived through the deaths of his parents, three of his children (one who is listed in the census but disappears while still a child), his only sister and only brother, his brother’s wife and his little nephew Oliver. He had also lost to death his grandson Wayne Watrous and would lose another grandson named Martin Watrous in 1885. In 1883, in Utah, our ancestor Samuel mourned the death of his son Marion who was twenty-seven. Marion died of consumption from his work in the mines.
The photographs in this summary and on this website were kindly taken by a stranger at my request. We may not have all of the faces of this large and interesting family, but we have their names and feel that we know them.