Here's to serendipity and shaky leaf hints!

Just a couple days ago I mentioned in a comment on Facebook that I had never been able to track down the burial place of a son of my 3rd great-grandfather, Michael McDaid.  The son's name was William Riley McDaid and Civil War pension files mentioned that he had died of smallpox in Washington DC in 1863, but there was no information about what had been done with his body.  He was a member of a West Virginia Cavalry unit that fought for the Union and he had enlisted just over the state line from where he grew up in Pennsylvania.  Occasionally, I would search Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org to see if there was any new information about him, and I made a couple of finds that got my hopes up for a while, but those clues never led to solid evidence.  

For example, I found two entries for him in a database on Ancestry called "U.S., Burial Registers, Military Posts and National Cemeteries, 1862-1960".  

This one under Wm McDaid, lists him with burials at Point Lookout Confederate Cemetery in Maryland.  It called him a member of the 1st Virginia Cavalry, technically correct because there was no West Virginia yet at the time when he died.  I was afraid this meant that he had been mistakenly identified as a member of the Confederate Army.  

 

Then there was some information in the same database which was indexed on Ancestry under "Rebel William R McDaed", again making me afraid he had been misidentified as a soldier in the CSA.  The tiny writing above his name mentions Arlington, Virginia, but the information with the link to the image looks like this, showing his burial place as "Soldier's Home Cemetery" which is in Washington, DC.  In retrospect, I wish I had paid more attention to the words "Arlington VA".  You'll see why if you read on.

This was the full page:

As I could find no other indication that William R. McDaid had been buried at either of those places, I connected both records to him in my tree on Ancestry, but I continued to leave his burial information blank. 

Since I had been thinking of him a couple days ago, when Ancestry showed me a shaky leaf hint with his name yesterday I looked at it right away instead of ignoring the hint as I often do.  This time it showed me this record from a database called "U.S. National Cemetery Interment Control Forms, 1928-1962"

This showed that he had been buried at Arlington National Cemetery, a place I've visited a few times in the past, never suspecting that a relative might be buried there.  It also mentioned another place where he may have been interred, Harmony Grove Cemetery.  Had he been reinterred more than once, or were the previous records mistaken? Maybe I'll be able to track down that mystery someday.

So...I googled Arlington National Cemetery burials and found that the cemetery has a searchable database online at Arlington National Cemetery.  A search for William McDaid led me to this, which includes a photograph of the gravestone itself.

His date of death matches what I already knew, so I think I can say that it's certain that my great great great Uncle William was indeed buried at Arlington and I'm relieved to be sure that he was not misclassified as a Confederate Soldier when he died.  I've been wondering for years how I would go about correcting the record of that had happened.  I can't wait until I can make another trip to Washington DC sometime to visit his gravesite in person. Until then, I'll have to be satisfied to visit his memorial on FindaGrave.com where someone had created his entry under "W. R. McDaid" with no further information.  I sent some corrections to that member and she updated his online memorial right away with his estimated birth year (about 1840) and his exact date of death as well as connecting him to the rest of his family on Find a Grave!  The photograph submitted there looks very different from what is shown on the ANC website, so maybe the original stone was replaced, or perhaps the picture on the ANC site is not an accurate view of the real marker.  This is what was photographed by FindaGrave member "Hope" in 2008:

Pvt William Riley McDaid (1840-1863)