Monday, June 25, 2012

Finding "Lost" People


 

Did you see the article in The Spokesman-Review that included this picture? It was a story from
Medicine Rocks State Park in Montana and was the sad story of how they've found where a lonesome sheep herder named Herbert Dalton in 1904 carved a likeness of his lost love into a sandstone bluff. He was from Ireland and, according to the article, "she wouldn't come West." The carved portrait shows a profile with a "sweeping turn-of-the-century bun and facing her, a bird in flight offering a delicately drawn flower."  So sad.  
 
I did some looking and did find a Herbert Dalton, age 33, single, born April 1867 in Ireland, immigrated in 1872 and was naturalized,  living as a farm laborer/sheep herder in Flatwillow District, Fergus County, Montana, on June 21, 1900 (U.S. 1900 census). I did not find him in the 1910 or 1920 census. Nor could I find him in any online Montana death databases.
 
Is there a Dalton family somewhere looking for a lost Herbert Dalton?? Do you look for these sorts of things and do they motivate you to go find "the rest of the story?" 

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