Saturday means Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver, who has provided an interesting challenge this week:

1)  Create your own tombstone at http://www.tombstonebuilder.com/.  And/or create one for a relative who doesn’t have one, or one for an event or significant issue.

2)  Share your creation with the genea-sphere in your own blog post, or on Facebook or Instagram.  Be sure to drop a link in a comment to this post.

Tombstonebuilder is a new-to-me website, but couldn’t be any easier to use – just type in the words and date and click on Make the Tombstone.

I decided to create a tombstone for one of my Loyalist ancestors. I haven’t really found any Revolutionary War Tories in my family (to me, Tories supported the king, but stayed put in the U.S. after the War for Independence vs. Loyalists, who fled to Canada afterwards), but I do have a half dozen Loyalist ancestors who became residents of the newly created province of New Brunswick, Canada.

John Adams was a well-to-do man with a young family living in Westport, Connecticut.  During the war,  they left Connecticut for New Jersey, where he and his eldest son, Jonathan, worked in the Commissary General’s office. Then, in the fall of 1783, the family boarded a ship that was part of the fleet that sailed out of New York to Canada.

John appears to have been a squatter on Adams Island in West Isles of New Brunswick and became a fisherman. He sons followed suit, eking out a living from the sea. It took three generations for the family to get back on its economic feet. John paid dearly for his support of King George III.

John was probably buried on Adams Island, but also probably never had a gravestone, so this one is for him.

I liked this challenge Randy – it was quite unique and I learned about tombstonebuilder.com.