Many of you will recall that I am working to rescue a historic Pauper’s Cemetery here in Dallas where I live. Last summer I posted an article called Finding Nemo, in which I began telling the story of one of the many loose markers we found at the cemetery. It happens to bear the name of one of my friends, Emilio Garcia, and caught my attention. Emilio’s nickname is Nemo and I set off to find where this marker belonged.

There wasn’t a clear match in the records and I had eliminated all the possibilities of where the marker belonged. At least I thought I had until now.

I currently have a team of people working to download all the Death Certificates we can retrieve in the cemetery in order to correct the thousands of mistakes present in the old markers before we work to order replacements. While doing my part on this project I stumbled across the death certificate today.

The reason I couldn’t find it is because the Medical Examiner’s office had written the name Elvira Garcia in the register. So, I had overlooked it as a possibility because it was obviously a female. But not so.

My search was a little vague and I had only input the surname and the year of birth and death in Dallas County, Texas. That brought up just two records and the answer was staring me in the face.

I anxiously opened the record to find if it was a match and was elated to find that it was a perfect match with the marker and also matches the dates in the register for that grave.

So, we are finally able to tell Nemo’s story and can know where he is buried in the cemetery (Block 12, Section 4, Space 13, East). Sadly this section is where the drainage problems occur, but we hope to have those addressed soon.

He lived just a month and 2 days and died of malnutrition during the Great Depression. This was all to common of a diagnosis at that time as infant mortality rates skyrocketed during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression.

Welcome Back to the world Nemo!