Another family story proves to be true...

On a visit to my husband's aunt (several years ago) we were shown the following picture and told that Ivan Luther Osborn (my husband's granduncle - pictured above with his wife, Ruth) was a cook on a movie set and died in an airplane crash in 1955. The photo is what was left of the airplane. We didn't know if the crash happened while working on the movie set, and we didn't know where the crash happened. Last week I decided to see if I could prove any of this story.

I checked Find-A-Grave and found Ivan's burial in Memory Gardens Cemetery, Imperial County, California. The death date matched what we were told by my husband's aunt. I checked historical newspapers on Ancestry, GenealogyBank and NewspaperArchive. Nothing. I next did a google search for databases of airplane crashes and found Plane Crash Info.com. Richard Kebabjian has crash infomation going back to 1920. I checked 1955, but there wasn't a listing for Ivan's crash. I e-mailed Richard (the web site owner) and he was kind enough to e-mail the following newspaper article (from Nevada State Journal) to me. There are still many unanswered questions, but at least we know that the story of the airplane crash was true.

Dies In Crash

El Centro, Calif., April 5. (U.P.) - Ivan Osborne, 48, of Gordon Wells, was killed, and Bruce Bowler, also of Gordon Wells, was seriously injured today when their small plane crashed in the desert 35 miles east of here. Osborne was the pilot.