UNDERTAKER: Final Journey Begins Here

Back in the good old days Funeral Homes did not exist. Rather, the people who would frequently undertake the final preparations of a person's final trip would be a furniture store. One of those furniture stores in Portland was the A D Kenworthy furniture store in Lents. They were located on the ground floor of the IOOF Halls on "Main" Street, Lents at what is now the corner of S.E. 92nd Avenue and Ramona Street.

The building still remains, but the furniture store "undertaker", like many of it's customers is now long gone.

Jay Dee Boyer

Located in what was the wilds of western Washington County, Oregon is the now former town of West Timber, where a Post Office and railroad station were located west of the town of Timber. This is where J D Boyer found employment after moving from Pennsylvania to Oregon in the early twentieth century. The trees would have been big at that time since that was before all the big ones were laboriously cut down, and before the Tillamook burn fires occurred later on a few miles west. What prompted Jay Dee to move from home in Pennsylvania where he was born in 1895 to parents who moved from Germany we will most likely never know. But move to Oregon he did, and found a job working for the Eagle Timber Co., in West Timber.

We know little of Jay Dee's life, other than his parent's names were Chas., and Veronica and they were both born in Germany. We know that Jay Dee was single at the time of his death from heart issues and pneumonia. Jay Dee died at St Vincent's Hospital on 9 October 1927. According to his Certificate of Death he was buried two days after his death on 11 October 1927. A funeral service to which friends were invited was held at St Stevens church at E. 42nd and Taylor on Wednesday, October 12, 1927. Jay D Boyer is buried in the back of the cemetery in Section G.

J D Boyer, 1895-1927