A common business in America frontier towns was the combination hardware store and funeral home: Containing information such as birth and death dates, names of family members, and places of birth and death, the funeral records kept by these stores are valuable sources of information to genealogists and historians.
On April 19, 1892, William H. Munger claimed a town lot in Watonga, in the just opened Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation. That evening, he hauled a prebuilt building to the site, and opened a hardware store: A furniture store and funeral home were added later. The Munger Hardware and Funeral Store kept a funeral record of customers from June 29, 1915 to October 2, 1921.