My Great Great Great Grandfather George Sheard

A couple weekends ago my parents were able to fly out for a visit. My Mom has been wanting to visit this cemetery just outside Burlington WI ever since she found out we had ancestry buried there. So we took a day to journey down to Burlington to see if we could find the gravestone of my Great Great Great Grandfather George Sheard. George was born in England and traveled to America, ending up in Wisconsin as a farmer. He son moved to Kansas where 3 generations later my Dad was born. With my Mom's research on what two roads the cemetery was located on and my understanding of how Wisconsinites name their roads we actually found the cemetery with little difficulty. As we walked around my Mom began to get excited as each headstone we passed had names on it she recognized from her genealogy research. We soon found many headstones with the name Sheard on it, this was actually pretty cool to me. Sheard isn't a very common name, in fact I never have met anyone outside my immediate family with the last name, so seeing so many of our relatives in one place was exciting. Dad was the one to find his Great Great Grandfather first, his headstone being carved into the shape of a tree, with a book leaning on the trunk with engravings for his wife and two kids that died at a young age. Soon after our findings an older couple drove up to the cemetery to see if we needed help, of course my Mom got to talking with him about who we were looking for and we found out he was a decedent of our grandfathers brother. He also told us to go visit another couple down the road that took care of the cemetery. So we paid an unexpected visit to the cemetery caretaker and his wife. They welcomed us in and spent an hour with us pulling out all the records and photographs that they had and sharing stories that they had learned from growing up there. They also told us that the farm that used to be in our family was right down the road, what a cool trip to be able to visit the farmland that used to be farmed by my own Great Great Great Grandfather, who knew that it was so close to where I am living now. I am so grateful to my Mom's dedication to finding our family history. It was a really neat experience to be apart of and makes me especially grateful for family today.

The Great Great Grandson and Great Great Great Granddaughter


My Mom looked at every headstone in the cemetery (luckily it was a pretty small cemetery)


This was my favorite document, showing the Sheard family coming over from Liverpool to Boston.