This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list.
Classification: Query
Message Board URL:
http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/XQB.2ACE/88.2
Message Board Post:
Pittsburg, CA
June 13, 2003
With reference to your request for information about William Drysdale, 1838-1888 of
Nevada, I have some information.
About thirty years ago I visited Virginia City, Nevada. When
touring the Masonic Cemetery at Virginia City, I came across a headstone with, as nearly
as I can remember, the inscription "William Drysdale, Native of Scotland,
1838-1888."
The grave is close to the main entrance to the cemetery. As you enter, turn left, walk ten
yards and it will be on your left next to the perimeter.
There were fresh flowers on the grave. I made enquiries and found the lady who had put the
flowers on the grave. I have forgotten her name. However, she was the widow or former wife
of a Drysdale who was related to the baseball player Don Drysdale.
I went to the local historical society office in Virginia City the name of which I cannot
recall and looked up the circumstances of William Drysdale's death.
He died in a mining accident. He and three men with Irish names were riding on an elevator
going from the bottom of a mineshaft to the surface. Apparently this type of elevator was
a platform with no walls. The elevator platform was carrying a load of either 4X4 or 6X6
pieces of lumber. some of this load shifted during the ascent, snagged one wall of the
shaft, causing the platform to break. The four men on board fell into the mineshaft and
died.
The name Drysdale, as you well know, is Scottish. I am descended from an Irish branch of
this family. My grandfather, Samuel Drysdale, was born in Belfast in the 1860's became
a riveter's apprentice in the Belfast shipyards, left that job to join the Royal
Iniskilling Fusiliers, Married my Grandmother, Bridget Bullman from Shanballymore, County
Cork and shipped out to India where he spent much of his career. He retired from the R. I.
F. as an infantry sergeant.My father, William Drysdale, was born in Dublin in 1903,
emigrated to New York and married my mother, Mary Jane McKeon of Dublin. I was born in New
York in 1937 and the family went back to Ireland in 1939. I returned to the U.S. in 1962.