I have been working on filling in missing pieces of the family tree. especially shrubbing the tree out. This becomes especially helpful in the world of DNA. I have spent the last 2 weeks working on Gs family so I decided to look at one of my lines and see what I could do.

James Stewart was born March 1878, most probably in Clinton County. He is the sone of Joseph Gardner Stewart and Ella May.

He appears to live with his parents during all the census records I found him in beginning in 1880, 1892, 1900.  I really knew nothing about him until I found a picture on Ancestry of the July 26, 1927 Plattsburgh Sentinel about a Funeral for James. It was a fairly long obituary.

When I find things like this I head to one of my favorite sites NYS Historic Newspapers. So I performed a search of 1927 and James Stewart. Oh poor James.

James died in a horrific car crash. The following are 3 different articles from 2 different papers The Lake Placid News, The Plattsburgh Sentinel and The Plattsburgh Republican.

The Plattsburgh Republican had so many details (one of the things I love about old newspapers. It gives me the 2 men in the car with James. It gives me where his brother William lived in NYC (how did I not know that William lived here in NYC). It also told me the type of car a Nash Touring Car. I had heard of Nash, I even think there was a movie about them though I could be wrong. So a quick google search to see what a Nash Touring Car looked like yielded this picture.

I think this is about a 1923 or 1925 Nash. Most of the pictures reveal that they were soft top cars. The guilt poor William must of lived with.

James Stewart died July 22, 1927 in Peru, Clinton County, NY. I am going to research and see if I can find the road they were driving on. I have probably been on it at some point growing up.

James Stewart’s funeral was held at the Redford Methodist Episcopal Church and he is buried in the Redford Cemetery from what I found he never married and never had children. He was 49 years old when he died and he should be remembered.