From Stewart Bonar, April 2023
I was delighted to find Jane Bonnar in your lists, I had long wondered what had happened to her. Her gravestone says “Jane, wife of William Bonnar, died Dec 26th 1878 in the 87 year of her age.” At the foot of her grave is another, more modern, stone. On the back of this stone she is also memorialized as Jane Bonnar (1791-1878). All that is fine. However, on the front of the stone is memorialised Matthew, Jane and Jane Campbell. There is no surname mentioned on the front of the stone, so you have assumed that they too were Bonnars. But Jane did not have a son called Matthew and the name Matthew does not occur in my Bonnar family of that era. It took me time to work out what was happening here. William & Jane had a daughter, also called Jane, who married a Matthew Strachan here in Scotland, before emigrating to Pennsylvania in 1851. I guessed that Matthew Bonnar was actually Matthew Strachan. I looked in your list and Matthew Strachan is also listed because he has a separate stone. If you look at the dates of Matthew Bonnar (1823-1879) and Matthew Strachan (died 1879 in the 56 year of his age) you will find they are the same. So Matthew Bonnar is a mistake, the stone is actually memorializing Matthew Strachan. I was left wondering why the Strachan name did not appear on the family stone, causing the confusion. I asked a contact of mine who lives in the area if he would kindly take a photo of the graves so I could see how they relate to each other. Matthew Strachan is buried right next to Jane Bonnar. The Strachan family stone at the foot of Jane’s grave is right next to a stone at the foot of Matthew’s grave that has the Strachan name in large letters. I guess the family felt they didn’t need to repeat the surname because it was already on the adjacent stone. They must have thought the surname connection is more obvious than it actually is.
So those memorialized in those two adjacent plots are:
*Jane Bonnar (nee Hunter), wife of William Bonnar
*Matthew Strachan
*Jane Strachan (nee Bonnar)
*their daughter, Jane Campbell (nee Strachan).
Information and documents provided by Shelley Guthoerl
1. US Returns from Regular Army Infantry Regiments
This is an interesting read about his service in the Phillipine Islands.
His name is #26 in the list.
2. Strachan tree
This is from my ancestry.com account. William Elmer Strachan’s wife Margaret E Sole MacDonald Strachan is my great grandmother. William was her 2nd husband.
3. Wm E Strachan Veteran Burial Card. This document was what told me he was buried in St Clair Cemetery.
St. Clair Cemetery 