St Paul Baptist Church

 There is an old saying about how something is always easy to them what ain't gotta do it. I thought I had learned that lesson long ago. And perhaps I had. But I received a refresher course today. 

I need to set the scene properly.

Not that I am old (ok. I am old), but in a rather unusual set of circumstances I have lived on the same street all but about the first 18 months I have been alive. Almost all of that time in one of two adjacent houses. Explaining at would take far too much time and would be tangential to the main tale. Just accept that I have been in the immediate area a considerable time. And as that covered my post diaper childhood you can imagine that it also involved a great deal of rambling through the surrounding vicinity. There weren't many places we did not trespass on investigate.

Less than half a mile from the homestead sits a house with what we all assumed as kids was a massive front yard. Lots in the area at that time averaged about a half acre. Some were larger, some smaller. This place is closer to a full acre with half that being the front yard. 

Or so we thought.

Not all that many years ago we learned that the open expanse in front of the house was actually a cemetery. Understand that there were no markers or monuments of any kind on it for years upon years. Suddenly as we passed by (doubtless on our way to something we should not have been doing) we see standing there a large granite marker reading 'St Paul Baptist Church Cemetery'. Over the years following about 3 or 4 individual markers were placed. Whether these are on the exact spots of the graves or not I cannot say. Now to say I was taken aback about there being a cemetery from a long gone church is to understate the case in the extreme.

Much as I tried to get more details on the church there simply wasn't much to glean. Even newspaper archives were coming up dry (so far - still searching). What I did manage to find at one point was a minor blurb from one of the local TV station news show that covered the highlights. Even that was woefully lacking in any real details and confirmed sources. Just a recap of claims.

Basically it was not one of the better periods in our social history. We are talking about Georgia, relatively near Atlanta, Decatur, and Stone Mountain (the granite mountain and the city). The church was established some time before the late 1910s (perhaps much earlier that then), and was a Black Congregation. At some point in the 1950s (perhaps 1960s) a certain group of people decided that the church had to go. There seems to be little doubt that this was on racial/racist grounds. The precise Whats, Whens, and Whos are all but impossible for me to pin down. But the bottom line is that the church relocated and the cemetery was left behind and was not tended or maintained. 

At some point in the ensuing years a few descendants of those interred there stepped up to reclaim it. Hence the markers and monuments. There were, according to the one report I was able to find, accusations that several graves were paved over. Apparently there were attempts to determine if this was the case but they were, at best, inconclusive. There is a map of the larger area from 1915 but it is of little help as the quality is simply not sufficient to accurately place many sites on a current map.

But until today there were only about 4 memorials in Find A Grave for this cemetery. Clearly, if this was an operating church graveyard for decades then there should be many more than 4 graves. So I started delving into the larger local newspaper archives looking for obituary or death notices mentioning the church. I managed to add about 13 memorials based on this. I then tried to find these people in Ancestry so I could include their birth year, at least, if not definitive birth and death details.

What an exercise in frustration that turned out to be. Which brings up the re-learned lesson. 

Anyone who has done any amount of genealogy research at all knows well the frustration of not finding any records. Or what you find being so vague that you cannot possibly link it to the person you are researching which any degree of confidence. But unless the person you are researching is 6, 7, 8, or more generations back, or is an immigrant whose name was changed or came from somewhere where records do not exist or are not accessible. it takes a while to hit that wall. People living in the 1930s or 1940s in the States are generally not that hard to research.

So here I was, researching a Black church graveyard. The people I was finding had died anywhere from 1928 to about 1949. Two were children, one 8 years old, another only about 6 months. I could find death certificates for several, though their details about parents, etc. were often DK - Don't Know.

And the majority? They might as well have never existed as far as the records are concerned. No Census entries. No Death Certificates. And recorded births? Don't be silly. 

I have long known that for Black people tracing their family there is a massive, almost impenetrable wall immediately before the 1870 US Census. That being the first census where the former slaves were enumerated by name. Prior to that they were usually just counted by sex and age as property to be taxed. What I never really grasped is just how late in history that wall continued to exist for so many. Yes, there was Segregation, Jim Crow, Oppression, and all that baggage. I just never knew (or appreciated) how much all that pushed into basic records of the time. Nor how insanely difficult it is for Blacks today to find ancestors and relatives in the records less than a century old.

Researching is always easy for them what ain't doing the research. And only them what is doing it can appreciate just how hard it really is.