Finding John Young: A Connection to Home in Whitesboro, New York
Some of the most memorable stops during our travels begin with a simple discovery along the way. On July 14, 2026, while traveling during our summer vacation, we realized our route would take us near the cemetery where John Young, the founder of Youngstown, Ohio, is buried. Being from the Youngstown area, we could hardly pass up the opportunity to pay our respects to the man whose name became such a familiar part of our lives. With that, Grandview Cemetery in Whitesboro, New York, became another stop on our journey.
We arrived later in the day without much expectation of actually finding his grave. Although we knew he was buried in Grandview Cemetery, we did not have a marked location on Find A Grave to guide us to the right spot. Anyone who has searched for a particular headstone in an unfamiliar cemetery knows how challenging that can be. Sometimes you have a section number or a helpful landmark, and sometimes you simply start looking and hope for the best. This visit was definitely the latter.
As we drove through the cemetery, we came around a bend and noticed a monument that we thought might belong to John Young’s father-in-law. We were not certain, but it was enough to make us stop and take a closer look. What had started as a drive through the grounds suddenly became a search around a family plot. We walked among the stones, reading names and trying to determine whether we had stumbled into the right place.
The family connection offered a meaningful clue. John Young was born in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1763 and later moved to Whitestown, New York. In 1792, he married Mary Stone White, the daughter of Hugh White, the early settler for whom Whitestown was named. Before John Young’s name became connected with a new Ohio settlement, his life was already firmly tied to this part of New York.
Young’s connection to the Mahoning Valley began in 1796, when he traveled there with a party of men to survey a tract of 15,560 acres in the Connecticut Western Reserve. On February 9, 1797, he purchased the township, establishing the settlement that would bear his name. By selling land to incoming settlers, he helped turn the surveyed property into a growing community along the Mahoning River. The place we know as Youngstown began with those early efforts to establish homes and build a settlement.
In 1799, Young brought Mary and their children to live in Youngstown. Their time there, however, was relatively brief. The demands of raising a young family in a frontier settlement proved difficult, and in 1803 they returned to New York. John died there in April 1825, and Mary followed in September 1839. Although they spent their remaining years far from Youngstown, their connection to its beginnings endured.
Back in Grandview Cemetery, we continued looking around the family plot until we finally found the names we had come to see. There were John Young and his wife, Mary. What surprised us was the direction their headstone faced. Rather than facing the same way as the surrounding markers, its inscription faced the woods. We had been looking through the plot, but finding them required us to look from a different direction.
There was something especially memorable about that discovery. We had entered a cemetery in another state without knowing exactly where to search, driven around a bend, and stopped beside what turned out to be the very area we needed. How we managed to drive right to that spot is still beyond our understanding. We cannot explain it, but we were certainly grateful that we stopped.
Standing at their grave brought a piece of our own local history into focus. John Young is a name associated with the founding of a city, but here we were looking at the resting place of a husband and wife whose lives connected two communities hundreds of miles apart. For a moment, our summer vacation in New York felt closely tied to home.
We left Grandview Cemetery glad we had taken the chance, even without clear directions or much confidence that our search would succeed. A bend in the cemetery road, a possible family connection, and a little time spent reading headstones had led us to John and Mary Young. It was an unexpected discovery and exactly the kind of experience that keeps us exploring the history along our travels.
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