William Simons, found dead on the South Pemberton road

An unknown man in a farm lane

The first of two Burlington County Library index summaries of the New Jersey Mirror, from the "Local Briefs" column of February 13, 1907, is only two sentences long. A man described as middle-aged and not identified was found dead early that morning in a lane on the farm of Edward Logan, on the South Pemberton road. The record adds that the belief was that he had frozen to death. It names no finder and gives no other detail.

Named a week later

The second record, from the same "Local Briefs" heading a week on, February 20, 1907, names the dead man. It describes him this time as an aged man — the earlier record had said middle-aged, and the two are not reconciled anywhere in the index — found on the farm of Edward E. Logan, on the Mount Holly and South Pemberton stone road, on the Wednesday morning, which the index reads as the same February 13.

The identification, by that record, was made on the Thursday afternoon by William H. Ward, of Burlington, the dead man's son-in-law, and on the Thursday evening his widow went to H. H. Earnest's morgue and formally claimed the body as her husband's. The remains were taken to Vincentown on the Friday afternoon and buried in the cemetery there.

The same record carries an account of his last movements, and marks the crucial part of it as guesswork. He had visited his daughter at Vincentown the week before and was brought to Mount Holly to take the 9.30 trolley to Burlington. The trolley was not on time. What happened after that is, in the record's own framing, supposed: that he wandered away, became lost, and at last fell from exhaustion and froze to death. No witness to any of it is named.

What the records do and do not establish

Both items are index summaries rather than the newspaper's own printed wording, and neither carries a coroner, an inquest, a physician or a verdict. The identification is the firmest thing in them: it is attributed to a named relative and to the widow at the morgue, and the burial at Vincentown is recorded. The cause of death is not on that footing. "Frozen to death" appears in the first record as a belief and in the second inside a chain of supposition; no examination of the body is recorded, and the missed trolley is offered as an explanation of the death, not established as its cause. The records give no occupation for Simons, no age in years, and no closer location than Logan's farm on that road.

An unrelated Jacob Simons, of Red Lion, also appears in this index as found dead near his home in March 1893, and is the subject of a separate entry in this archive; nothing connects the two men.