Police Take Custody of Mystery Headstone, Ask for Help in Finding Descendants

Please note this comment by “Ollysdad” on the original, April 5th WSR post on this story:

For all amateur sleuths and genealogists–the speculation by the tombstone’s finder that Rose Roy Weiss was the woman who lived on Grandview Place in the Bronx in 1930 and was married to William Weiss is incorrect. Public records show that Rose R Weiss was born Rose Mary Cohen (she also used the name Rose Cone). After her marriage to William Weiss, she married the playwright Lyon Mearson, and died in Las Vegas in 1993. She and the two sons Richard and Robert noted in the article are all mentioned in Lyon Mearson’s 1966 NY Times obituary. The Rose Weiss buried under this errant tombstone is also not the Rose Weiss who was one of the pioneering Jews of Miami Beach (she died in 1974), or the Rose Weiss married to John Eugene Weiss who lived in Dade County in the 1940s (she died in 1978). And there’s something incongruous about the Vital Records office noting in her file that she had ‘no known relations’ when someone appears to have paid for a tombstone and declared her a ‘beloved mother’.