Tucked away in the old section of Mt. Pleasant Cemetery you will find many graves with names long forgotten in the area. John and Rachel Waffle are one of these families. I recently cleaned their headstone and wanted to see if they could be added to the PBFT project.

It took a couple evenings to do it. Although they show up in the old cemetery listing that was done in the early 1960s, they don’t show up in the Town records. This is not unusual for the older burials, and typically I can get around this by checking the birth and marriage records. But the Waffle name is not to be found. I checked the paper and found that John was a blacksmith in 1845 on the corner of Rochester and River Streets by the old Erie Canal. The family also shows up in the 1850 census with their seven kids; Margaret, William, Charles, John, Mary, Louisa, and Ellen. John dies in 1857 and Rachel lives until 1871. Although there are three Waffle male children, none appear to settle in the area.

In the 1870 census, Rachel is with her 10 years old daughter Ellen, and they have a 22 year old helper name Henry Marsh living with them. Hum. Did Henry marry? I wonder if her name was Ellen? Yep. Is there a Marsh family in the PBFT? Nope. Now what?

Well to cut this short, Henry Clay Marsh had a older brother named George Washington Marsh. (Henry had a twin named Millard Fillmore Marsh) George had a son named West Allen who married Caroline Myers. An interesting fact is that a newspaper article noted that George Marsh had served as a lock tender for nearly all his life. Their daughter Ruby Marsh married Seymour Barnes.

Seymour Barnes was the son of William Barnes Jr, and the grandson of William Sr. The William Sr had a sister Minerva who married Moses Dixon. And the Dixon family is well represented in the PBFT! Yea. So with this one family I was able to add the Barnes and Marsh families as well as the Hiserodt, Exner, Burdick, Rosecrans, and Exner names.

Henry Marsh ended up at Willard State Hospital and died there in 1926. I have not found Ellen Waffle or any of the other children.