American history is less a succession of large scale social or military or political events than it is the stories of the farmers and merchants and laborers and craftspeople who were born here and who immigrated from other countries, who lived and worked and suffered and were happy and went to war and had children and died over a period of some four hundred years.  The cemeteries of our country are truly our history.

The Owasco cemetery is my family's cemetery, and it is burial site of many of the early players in this Missouri story.  The cemetery was formed around 1860, and several soldiers are buried there.   It is located in Section 25, Township 62 North, Range 19 West. Owasco, ten miles southeast of Milan, the county seat of Sullivan County, Missouri, was laid out by Peter Putnam in 1858. According to an 1877 publication it was then owned by Arthur Brock, "who has a general store and is doing a prosperous and honorable business. Peter Putnam bought an acre of ground from James Cleeton, built a store, which he ran for a year or two and sold it to John McKinzey who later sold to Arthur Brock. There was a store, a post office and a blacksmith shop. The population consisted of less than twenty people, the members of three or four families."

In the first half of the 20th Century, Owasco was a rural post office located in the same building as a general store.  As a result of the post office and the speed of change of those cartologists who concern themselves with state maps, Owasco appeared as a place name on maps of Missouri until very recently, even though the store and post office were both gone by 1950.  Even now that intersection where a section line road crosses Missouri Route V is known as Owasco, and the place name can be located on the US Geological Survey database.

The Owasco church and cemetery lies not far from the site of the last store building.  The church building consists of a recently refurbished single room, sitting on a high point looking down a long hill to Little Yellow Creek.   (Since the name begs the question, you should know that Big Yellow Creek is a mile or two west of the church.  One of the early settlements in the area was at Yellow Creek). 

My father was Fred Riddle and my mother was Martha (Cleeton) Riddle.  Fred's parents were Lee Riddle and Alice Morris; Martha's parents were Floyd Cleeton and Allie Berry.  Those families were closely connected to other families in Sulivan County - Carmack, Coffman, Dillinger, and others.  This web site is focused on developing and sharing information about all of those families.   Family trees are easier to understand when in chart form.  Click here to see simple charts in pdf format of my ancestors.

Please help me complete the picture.  This web site is a work in progress.  If you have additional information of any kind -- whether names and dates or references  -- or if you see names or dates you know to be incorrect -- please contact me by email and I will make changes accordingly.  On the other hand, please feel free to copy any information from this site for your own use.

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