Ancestors

George Quackenbush

George Quackenbush was born at Bennington, Vermont, on 1 May 1886. He was the youngest of the four children of Adelbert Quackenbush and Nellie Knapp, who had married about 1876 and spent most of their married life on Branch Street in Bennington. His brothers were Albert, called Robert, and Frank, and his sister was Susan, later Mrs. Edward A. Martin.

George worked as a stonemason. Bennington was a town of quarried marble and granite, and stone work was a trade a man could keep there all his life. Alice Carpenter, the daughter of a Civil War veteran, grew up on the same street, Branch Street extension, where her widowed mother died in 1918. On 23 July 1917 their son Stanley Shirley Quackenbush was born at Bennington. The birth return gives George as 31 and Alice as 21, both born in Bennington, and names Stanley as Alice's second child.

On the morning of Wednesday, 30 August 1922, George's son Richard, who was seven, went bird hunting with Richard Martin, who was eleven, in a thicket on the west side of Branch Street extension, near the cluster of houses beyond the Branch Street bridge where both families lived. The Martin boy had a .25-calibre Stevens rifle and had set up a target. Just as he pulled the trigger, the younger boy ran in front of the gun, and the bullet struck him in the back of the head. Richard Quackenbush died instantly. The state's attorney, George A. Mathers, looked into the shooting and told the selectmen it was entirely accidental and needed no action. The other boy was the son of Edward Martin, and George's sister Susan was the wife of an Edward A. Martin of Bennington, so the two boys were very probably first cousins.

The marriage did not last. Alice later married Douglas G. Laker and had two daughters with him, June Rose in 1926 and Barbara in 1928. When George's mother died in September 1928, her obituary listed him among her surviving children, all of Bennington.

George Quackenbush died at Brattleboro, Vermont, on 11 May 1958, ten days after his seventy-second birthday. He was brought home and buried in Park Lawn Cemetery in Bennington, where his parents lie. His stone reads simply "George Quackenbush, 1886, 1958."

If George Quackenbush is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "George Quackenbush (1886-1958)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/george-quackenbush-1886-1958-038402.