PA DEATH CERTIFICATE
Name: Delilah E Cheney
Gender: Female
Race: White
Age: 9
Birth Date: 31 Oct 1908
Birth Place: Pennsylvania
Death Date: 30 Nov 1917
Death Place: North East, Erie, Pennsylvania, USA
Father: George B Cheney
Mother: Florence Pettis
Certificate Number: 119686
The informant is George B. Cheney of North East PA.

Tombstone's origin a cold case mystery that's finally solved
By Scott DeSmit [email protected] | Posted: Saturday, September 14, 2013 12:00 am
It is not unusual for retired police officers to be haunted by an unsolved case.
Stories abound about former detectives who pour through cold cases in hopes of solving the one that got away.
Sometimes they get lucky.
More often than not, they don't.
Former city of Batavia Police Chief Mark Robinson had such a case, a case he has solved after a mystery that began nearly 40 years ago.
Ask Robinson and he wouldn't say this case haunted him. Rather, it intrigued him.
He was curious.
"It's a little bit of a mystery," Robinson said in an interview that, ironically, appeared in The Daily News exactly 19 years ago today. "So it would be interesting to find out."
That, he did.
It was the case of the lost tombstone, a small, six-sided engraved stone that was found by a construction worker helping build the Genesee Country Mall in 1974.
The stone was turned into the police department and, after a few inquires, was placed in storage.
The stone is engraved with the name of a little girl, Lila Cheney, who was born in 1908 and died in 1917.
Robinson wasn't aware of the stone until he cleaned out the storage room in 1981.
"I saw it and realized ‘I can't throw this out,' " Robinson said. "Somewhere there's an unmarked grave and that's a situation that needed to be corrected."
He took it upon himself to make more inquires, to local funeral homes, towns and villages, all to no avail.
Seven years later he made more attempts, again with no luck.
Since the stone was found in Batavia, it likely came from a local cemetery or family plot.
At least that's what the theory was.
The stone remained in Robinson's office until he retired. Now it sits in the house in Le Roy he shares with his wife, Karen.
Robinson recently decided he would renew his efforts to find Lila Cheney's grave.
He took a genealogy course at Richmond Memorial Library. Searched more local records.
One possibility was this: Ruth McEvoy's "History of Batavia," mentions the Spoffords, a married couple who were both doctors. The wife's maiden name was Cheney.
"They lived on Bank Street and their back yard would be where the mall is," Robinson said. "Karen and I took a ride to the family plot and found their graves."
Nothing was there that would connect the couple to Lila Cheney.
Birth and death certificates were checked.
"The fear was that it could have been their daughter and maybe she had Down syndrome or something. People didn't talk about things like that back then."
Robinson's detective work along with his new training in genealogy finally paid off on Aug. 12.
"I discovered it on a website called Find A Grave," Robinson said. "I made a few calls. Contacted a funeral home because they usually know contacts for cemeteries and I talked to the cemetery caretaker's wife."
Find A Grave listed a Lila Cheney buried in Phillips Cemetery in North East, Pa., a small township in Erie County that borders New York at Chautauqua County.
The cemetery caretaker's wife went to the grave and, sure enough, the stone was missing from a site next to George Cheney's burial plot.
"She told us there was a base and old post that stuck up out of the ground," Robinson said. "There's no question that this was it."
Not only that but Lila Cheney's name was engraved on a newer stone marking George Cheney's grave. George Cheney was born in 1872 and died in 1952 and almost certainly was Lila's father.
That discovery led to more:
— George Cheney was divorced and no records were found regarding his first wife, who was likely Lila's mother.
— Lila had a brother, Stanley Cheney and a stepsister, Grace Fox, a child George had with Mary Fox.
— Phillips Cemetery was vandalized in the early 1970s, with a car going through the cemetery and knocking over stones. Robinson has yet to find a police or newspaper record of the vandalism.
The discovery also led to more questions:
— Who was George Cheney's first wife.
— How did Lila Cheney die?
— Who installed a new stone for George Cheney since he died in 1952?
— The most intriguing question of all is: How did Lila Cheney's stone find its way to Batavia, a distance of 112 miles from North East, Pa.?
Robinson has a few theories, one is that the vandal stole the stone and at some point ended up in Batavia. Both Batavia and North East are just off the Thruway.
"Perhaps he was driving through and saw the mall construction site and dumped it off," Robinson said.
It may be a mystery that Robinson never solves. He's still checking newspaper archives and has contacted historians and others who may be able to solve the mysteries that remain.
For now the stone will remain with the Robinsons in Le Roy.
"We do plan on returning it," Karen Robinson said. "We'll take it back down and screw it back on to the post. But it would be nice to let a family member know that it's back."