Bertha S. Voth - El Reno, OK
Posted by: hamquilter
N 35° 34.834 W 099° 00.208
14S E 499685 N 3937428
Out in a plowed field alongside the country road, this headstone would be very easy to miss.
Waymark Code: WMPGZQ
Location: Oklahoma, United States
Date Posted: 08/30/2015
Views: 3
Located in a field on the North side of Darlington Road NW, about 2-1/2 miles west of Highway 81, and about five miles northwest of El Reno, this tall marble headstone is surrounded by an iron fence in the middle of a plowed field.
The inscription reads:
In Memory
of
Bertha E.
Dau. of
Rev. H.R. & B.B.
VOTH
Died
Mar. 30, 1889
Aged
2 Yrs. 2 Mo.
20 Ds.
This would mean that Bertha was born in January 1887. The day she died was just three weeks before the Land Rush of 1889, opening this area of settlement by non-Indians. In researching Rev. H.R. Voth, we learned that he was Heinrich (Henry) Richert Voth (4/15/1855 - 6/2/1931). He was a Mennonite missionary who worked at the nearby Darlington Indian Agency. He was an ethnographer who studied people and cultures, and later wrote papers on the Arapaho and Hopi Indian tribes, in Oklahoma Territory, and later in Arizona.
Bertha's mother was Barbara Baer Voth. The Voths married in 1884, and Barbara died also in 1889. As the location of this gravesite is fairly near the original Darlington Indian Agency, it is possible it was on residential property of the Voths back then.