Murray Cheston Boyer

Murray was the first of five children of Titus and Maria Boyer of Camden, New Jersey. His father was a store clerk and then a shipping clerk. Murray would follow along those lines, thriving in administrative matters.

He served a short term in the Navy during a short war with Spain in 1898. Murray was a Yeoman, a position that assisted either an engineer or the captain. His ship was the USS Resolute, a passenger steamship purchased by the Navy on April 21, the day after President McKinley signed a joint resolution of Congress demanding Spain withdraw from Cuba. It was the same day that a blockade of Cuba began.

Murray enlisted May14 and had very little training before the Resolute left New York on May 25. She assisted the fleet in scouting the movement of Spanish ships in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba on July 3. The American fleet of six ships sank the entire fleet of four Spanish ships. On July 8 the Resolute began transporting Spanish prisoners of war to New York.

Returning to the Cuba to help clear the harbor of Manzanillo in late July, she brought home the First Marine Battalion in August after an armistice was signed. The Resolute transported more troops home in October, and the Treaty of Paris officially ended the war on December 10.

Murray was discharged October 25, resuming his previous job of helping businesses and individuals file patents. While never claiming to have completed more than four years of high school, he described his job as patent attorney, staying with it for more than 60 years. 

By 1900 Titus was doing well and the family moved to suburban Haddonfield. In 1902 Jane Allen of Beverly, New Jersey became Murray’s bride. They settled in nearby Riverton where more than one census report shows a niece living with them along with one or two servants, but never any children of their own. He may have had several business clients or been employed by corporations, as he was in later years by the Esterbrook Pen Company in Camden, working to protect their patents from infringement.

Jane died in 1940 and was buried in her hometown, but Murray continued to work and live by himself well into his 70s. He moved to a smaller house but when independent living was no longer possible he moved across the river to the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia. When he died three weeks before his 90th birthday the Navy took care of his funeral, burial, and this military headstone.