Moreland, Ardell Cook, 1866-1896

Born: Platte Co. MO, 1866

Died: 4 March 1896

Ardell Cook was the daughter of Franklin and Lydia McClain Cook, and her mother is buried in this cemetery. Born in Platte County MO, she married Henry C. Moreland there in 1883. According to the marriage license, she was 17 at the time. Her mother had to give be present to give her consent.

Marriage License for Ardell Cook and Henry Moreland. 

       Ardell and Henry lived just across the Cimarron River to the north in Ripley, Payne County, where Henry had bought 79.7 acres in 1895. It was there that Lydia went to visit Ardell, visits which were tracked in the Chandler newspapers. The stone says she died in 1894, but the newspapers make it clear that the year was 1896. The stone must have been placed decades after her death, when the year had been forgotten. The writing is too clear to be from the 1890s.

Chandler News, 2 March 1894

The snippet gives Pleasant Ridge as Lydia’s residence because it was the nearest church and school (thus a named community) to the area where the McCorkles and their neighbors lived. (Oak Grove may have been a little closer, but it had no cemetery and thus was never as important as Pleasant Ridge. At various times the two Chandler papers carry a sub-section of local news headed Pleasant Ridge, but there was never any such sub-section for Oak Grove. Apparently the editors of the paper did not regard Otoe Township as part of their readership.) 

Ardell and Henry C. Morland had six children that are known, though only three survived into adulthood:

• Myrtle: born 1884, died before the 1900 census. 
• Nelly Ardell, born 1886, married John Davis and the couple were living in McKinley Township in 1920, but I have found no record of them thereafter.
• Henry: born 1888, before March 1896. His mother’s obit said she left three girls and one boy, which means that of these six children Henry died before his mother, as the other son lived until the 1960s. He is probably also buried in McCorkle.
• Maude C.: born 1889, married Jasper Christy before 1910.
• Charles A: born 1895, died 1969.
• Dark-Eyed Daughter: born 1895, died before 1900.

The last child has a poetic name because the only reference to her is a two-line notice in the Chandler News that says Henry Moreland has another “dark-eyed daughter.” She is not in the 1900 census, so she’s buried in McCorkle also.

One year after Ardell’s death, in March of 1897, Henry married Lilly Alma Beasler, with whom he had five children. He died after 1930, but his grave is unrecorded. If in his old age he was living with one of his children, who had mostly settled around Wellston, he should be interred in Star Valley or Rossville Cemetery like his Moreland kin, but nothing more is known. (To see some Wellston kin, go to the site for Henry's son Oscar and click on the left-sidebar link that says "All Morelands in Lincoln County.) The situation for genealogists of the Moreland family is complicated by the fact that until a few days ago (10 March 2014), Ardell’s married name was misspelled as Morehand, making it impossible for internet searches to locate her.