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This past week (June 14 -- June 23, 2002) our family took a special trip to Nauvoo, Illinois to tour the newly reconstructed LDS Temple there before it's dedication on June 27, 2002. While we were there we had the honor of doing a little more digging into our Leuck ancestry as well. This because the area they chose to settle some 40 years after our Ricks ancestors left Nauvoo is nearly in view of that special city. We visited Fort Madison, Iowa where my great-grandfather Nicholas Leuck died and was buried in 1893. We have always been mystified as to why he was buried there. Well,.... case solved. I was able to locate a copy of the 1893 notice of his death in the local newspaper where I learned he had been staying in Ft. Madison for medical treatment (Bright's Disease). Unfortunately, he succumbed to this illness. Here is a copy of his obituary from that newspaper from May 19, 1893 along with a copy of the front page of the same newspaper (clicking on either of these will enlarge the view):
Note: To get the detail here, these were scanned at 200dpi and are rather large. If you would like to save a copy of these for your own use I would suggest you click on the photo to see then enlarged version, then right-click the photo and choose "save-as" to save it to your computer. Once you have done this you can use most photo editors to re-size and print this photo in your home. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate his exact gravesite. After tracking down the obituary, I went to the church that handled the service. I was shown the church records of the funeral but was unable to make a copy of it -- it didn't really have any more information than what we already knew. But, it did tell me that he was buried in Gethsemane Catholic Cemetery out off of 15th Street. I then visited the funeral home that had the plot records but learned the unfortunate truth: About 1910 a Catholic priest determined to have more space available had many head stones bulldozed off the site into the woods where after people were buried on top of the existing graves with new markers. The old stones were discovered at a later date. Some were recovered but many were destroyed. They had no record of his placement in the cemetery. I mostly confirmed this after spending nearly an hour walking through it without discovering it. Here is a map of the location of the cemetery (it is behind the trucking company buildings):
Also, while there we cleared up the mystery of where "Clear Creek, Iowa" is. Clear Creek is not a "town" but rather a "township" which is a general area within a county. Harper, Iowa, where the family lived is a town within the township of Clear Creek. After much digging we found great-grandmother Anna (Fuhs) Leuck's grave at a small graveyard outside a most lovely Catholic church about 5 miles South-South/East of Harper. Here is a map of the location of the Clear Creek Catholic Church and Cemetery (click to enlarge -- The "X" marks the location of the church and cemetery):
There after much searching we found Anna's grave, the only Leuck in the cemetery. We were very worried that her gravestone might be faded away as we found many stone of that era completely eroded away. Wonderfully, we found that her stone was a higher grade granite or marble and not the sandstone we found in many locations. Pam took a rubbing of the marker which was very simple. Here are some links to those scanned rubbings. Again, these are high-quality scans that I have shrunk down to "thumbnail" size:
This is the marking that is on top of the stone. The initials are "IHS" which I believe means "In His Service". On the front of the stone we found the following which we had to scan in two pieces. If you want to print these you will have to piece them together after they are printed:
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