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Evergreen Cemetery DIG - not LA EC - so many Evergreen cemeteries, seems very interdasting…

https://www.heraldnet.com/news/forgotten-grave-reveals-a-local-link-to-obama/

Rest of artical

“We have both Republicans and Democrats who work here but everybody was excited by it,” said Allen Ice, general manager of the Evergreen Funeral Home and Cemetery. 

Shipman said it is rare to find an ancestor five generations removed from a national figure in cemeteries in Washington state, which became a territory in 1853 and a state in 1889. 

“It’s like a needle in a haystack,” he said. 

“What you found is accurate,” said Joshua Field, campaign director for Obama’s campaign in Washington state, after checking records. “It’s interesting. I don’t think people realize his Washington state ties.” 

Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, lived on Mercer Island before moving to Hawaii after she finished high school. Obama’s mother died in 1995 of ovarian cancer. Obama took time off the campaign trail Thursday and Friday to fly to Hawaii to visit his ailing 85-year-old grandmother, Madelyn Payne Dunham, who helped raise him. Rachel Wolfley is a great-grandmother to Madelyn Payne Dunham. 

Local historians are now trying to learn more about Wolfley’s life story. 

Her four-sentence obituary said she died at age 75 in her daughter’s home after a 3 1/2-year illness. It said she moved from Kansas and was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

The cursive scrawl from the 1910 U.S. Census in Snohomish County said she and her parents were born in Ohio and that she could read and write. She married Robert Wolfley in 1859 in Ohio. 

Military records show that Robert Wolfley served with Company A in the 145th Ohio National Guard infantry near the end of the war. It was a 100-day regiment formed to protect Washington, D.C., during the major campaigns that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant led into Virginia in the spring of 1864, Shipman said. He received a Civil War pension, which went to his wife after he died in 1895. 

Robert and Rachel Wolfley lived in Ohio and Kansas, where his occupation was listed as a farmer in several U.S. Censuses in the 1800s. 

Shipman speculates that it would have been too expensive to send Wolfley’s body back to Kansas to be buried alongside her husband. Her grave marker is typical of temporary ones of that era that were meant to be replaced by permanent stones later, Shipman said. 

Shipman hopes to get permission from Rachel Wolfley’s descendents, perhaps even Obama himself, to replace the grave marker with the misspelled name. He wants it to match the permanent gravestone of her daughter and son-in-law. Shipman and Ice have started a fund under the Evergreen Historic Committee, 4504 Broadway, Everett, WA 98203, to raise money for the stone. 

Wolfley has been added to a Everett Public Library podcast and map of noteworthy figures buried at the Evergreen Cemetery. The podcast for self-guided tours of the cemetery is expected to be available at www.epls.org on Oct. 31. 

“She’s right on the main tour route,” said David Dilgard, a historian at the Everett library.