Locklin Cemetery

 The allure of a road named for a cemetery is simply too strong to long ignore. Add in the facts that the name is known to be associated with Br'er's distant kin starting over two centuries back AND that it is smack in the area where all those kinfolk lived, and, well, checking it out becomes something of a moral imperative!

These days a LOT of initial research about where to go scampering is done on the internet. Learn what should be there, who should be there, what kind of access there is, and whether any distant relations might be buried there. Let's face facts - it is not possible to check every interesting old cemetery in the immediate area. And that only gets exponentially worse as one moves farther out from the home hutch.

So pick and choose are the order of the day. That means trying to stick to known people on the family tree, or the occasional famous grave or really interesting monument. That is not to say Br'er doesn't stop in on the occasional old cemetery on a whim. He does. More on that when I post about Rehobeth Cemetery in the future.

In this case the initial link is a 3rd cousin thrice removed who did not survive even his first year. Always a sad case to find. Pushing a bit further and it is clear that there are several more distant relatives there. Cousins all of various distance and generation. Time to go exploring. 

Ol' Br'er's nerves always get to twitching when it is obvious that there has to be some level of trespassing done to get where he aims to be. This was one of those cases. The cemetery is supposed to be a few yards off the road in a stand of trees between two houses. Out in the countryside. Where folks learn to shoot young and to be damned accurate. And usually do not cotton to strangers traipsing about their land without permission.

(sigh) No guts, no glory. In I go.

Fortunately there is not a lot of underbrush to hamper progress and visibility is good meaning and vertical markers should be readily visible at a distance. All this means saved steps. No need to grid search the area as would be the case if all the markers were flat.

Pausing to look around just a few feet into the trees and damned if I don't spot the cemetery! It is always better to be lucky than good.

(Ok. I stole the photos from Find A Grave. These are far superior to the ones I took.)

At least one marker previously photographed has gone missing or has fallen and been covered with leaves and weeds. I must confess that the layout has me perplexed. The graves are oriented on the East-West line as is traditional in Christian cemeteries (though less observed in recent times). But the border wall is not. This has the graves at an angle within the borders. Why? 

In researching how everyone here is related (and all those with names are, though three are spouses of blood kin) I uncovered a sad mystery.

At some point in 1978 - some 52 years after the wife died - relatives of one couple interred here had them disinterred and moved to a large city cemetery. Reasons were not stated (that I have been able to uncover), but I can easily imagine that they wanted their ancestors somewhere better maintained than the original family cemetery out in the woods. In and of itself this is not particularly odd or noteworthy.

It is what they did not do that is sad if not criminal.

They left the couple's infant child behind.

This couple was born in the mid 1800s, before "The Recent Unpleasantness", They married in at the end of January 1868,  a few years after the war ended. Later that year they had their first child. Their only child. There is no way of knowing whether the child was stillborn or lived a short time. But what we can state for certain is that it did not survive long enough to even be named. 

Whatever day the child was born, it died two days after Christmas 1868. And it was loved enough that its parents managed to purchase a headstone for it in the days of Reconstruction in the South when few had money to spare for luxuries.

They left the child behind. How? Why? I will never know. Perhaps that is best because I believe, were I to meet them face to face I might be moved to violence.