FINDS FORTUNE AT FATHER’S GRAVE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3303, 23 August 1911, Page 7

FINDS FORTUNE AT FATHER’S GRAVE.

GUARDIAN KEEPS MONEY 20 YEARS,

WOMAN MOURNER’S SURPRISE

Sarah Emma Kerr, of Potsdam, N.Y., will leave Boulder Colorado, £3OOO richer than when she arrived to find the grave of her father. He was buried two score years ago. Her discovery that she. was the owner of a valuable ranch which she did not know she possessed, reveals a. story of honesty and gratitude handed down from father to son that has seldom been, equalled in the part of the country. For 35 year's Mrs Kerr has lived in Potsdam unaware of any holdings in the East her birthplace. This year she decided to come West and decorate the grave of Her father. She had forgotten Boulder, save for the recollections of a school girl. When she arrived there she found two. unknown dead lying by the side of her father, and no stone to mark the paternal resting-place. Mrs appealed at once to old residents for information- regarding her father’s grave. The pioneers of Boulder directed 1 her to Waldo F. Bah cock, a wealthy rancher, who each year had adorned the unmarked grace with wild flowers. , , ' OWNER HER GUARDIAN. When she drove to the Babcock homestead she found that the owner was her guardian, tile custodian or 240 acres of valuable farming land reserved .for her, and (the?) devoted. friend of the dead father. While she had been in the East Babcock had scrupulously managed the affairs of her father’s handled it with a business acumen that had made it valuable, and tendered at to her without tax of guardianship, on the condition that she would release him as custodian. Mrs Kerr, with an unexpected competence “n her own name, recites the storv on the Kerr had been laid away. Waldo Babcock was appointed guardian of the estate of Sarah Emma Kerr. His father had assumed authority of the files of Boulder county and the recollections of pioneers. On April 27 1871, Joseph Iverr, a struggling rancher o*ll 240 acres ox land, died of pneumonia. He asked his neighbor and friend, Joseph Babcock, to take charge of his property, and died before any will was written. The only claimant to the estate, which was then of no value, was his infant daughter, Sarah Emma Kerr. Kerr was a- member of tJi© Indopondent Order of Oddfellows. With allegiance to- the society, Babcock bought lot 2 in the cemetery of Columbia Lodo-e Boulder, for the disposition of his friend’s body. The little girl’s mother had died several years before, and she went to the Babcoc'k home to live. At that time Waldo F. Babcock was a young man of 15. He was fond of Mr. Kerr, the neighbor, and it was an annual custom for the two to search through the Kerr fields on Memorial Day for flowers with which to decorate the graves of the dead. When his father died eight years after Mr. Kerr the responsibility of guardianship of the orphan on Ferbuary 3, 1872, and the authority was transferred 'in 1880. RELATIVES TAKE GIRL AWAY. In the meantime relatives from the East had taken the little child to Potsdam, N.Y., where she was placed in school. . , Before she was 20 she was married to her second cousin, William A Kerr, a "rooer in Potsdam. She had forgotten the life of the West, with but one tender recollection —that her father was buried there. ' _ During the years that passed Waldo F Babcock administered the affairs of the estate. With the recent increase in the population there, the inauguration of modern methods of farming tne dry leagues of the open, the property has become valuable. In five years it has leaped from a tract of unxeckoned value to an estate valued at £3OOO. . . . , When Mrs Ken* arrived here and established her identity, legal steps were taken at once to transfer to her the complete title in tne estate, including the burial plot, without one cent of the fees of guardianship being deducted.