Last Checked and/or Updated on: September 27, 2026

Any suggestions on other tragic events that you remember in southwest Washington State?? Let me know and maybe I'll use them in a future update of that Virtual Cemetery...

Long time genealogist/family historian and Find a Grave Pro, (Master Gardener, freshwater aquarist into Endler's Guppies, and an excellent cook too) who was born here in Elma, Washington although till April 2017 I never lived here. I grew up first in Puyallup a few blocks east of the famous Puyallup Fairgrounds. Then my Dad rec'd and accepted a business offer/opportunity in Hillsboro Oregon as a junior partner ("a fancy name for a parts manager", he'd say) in a newly built John Deere industrial equipment dealership for a year and a half or so 1964 to 1966 when the opportunity to buy the store back in Graham came up. So we bought the store and moved again, back to Graham. And from the 6th grade on till I went in the USAF, after we moved back from Oregon we actually lived a couple of miles south of Graham at 288th & Meridian. I graduated from Bethel High School in Spanaway class of 1972 and then spent nearly four years in the USAF as a bomb and missile weapons loader ending at Bitburg Air Base Germany upon my honorable discharge in early 1976 as an E-4 Buck Sgt. (click on the Cold War Veteran's patch above for more on my time in the USAF). And then into home construction, drywall and insulation mostly for two or three years. 30 years after that I retired from the City of Tacoma's Street Maintenance Dept. (in 2009). I sold my long time 35 year home on Whitman Lake near Kapowsin in 2015 (selling & moving from there may have been one of the best things I've ever done for myself :-) and returned to the local Elma area, this time for good (by myself) to get away from the heavily populated urban jungle that area (southwest Pierce County) has become and to be around family. We've had family members living in Elma for over 100 years so I'm still getting used to being the oldest and only Jacobus (my mom's family) member left presently living here. My only regret is in not moving here sooner. But God is great and so far so is retired life here in Elma...

Feel free to use any of my pictures. This is genealogy which is meant to be shared. Oh and where do I find all of this stuff?? I have a sub to Ancestry's Newspapers dot com where you have access to millions and millions of...newspapers from almost anywhere in the country (many from Int'l sources) and all that you can find using that amazing resource. So everything I post on these Find a Grave Memorials comes from Newspapers dot com. It's great!!! Check it out at www.newspapers.com where you can try it for 7 days free!!!