First off - and in no particular order - is Whaley Cemetery. This is a small family cemetery TW and I checked out last fall or somewhere there-abouts. At the time there were only some 5 recorded graves and only about 3 headstones visible. The small fenced lot was completely overgrown in briars and vines making it almost impossible to traverse the space. Even so I managed to find at least one unrecorded headstone for a child, a girl, and updated the database accordingly. I also updated the cemetery description in Find A Grave.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago and someone from the county historical society contacts me asking if I have more details on the cemetery and if I have any relatives in it. An Eagle Scout had cleaned up the cemetery for his project and the society was looking for more data on those buried there.
Naturally this required a revisit. That it was rainy, hot, and muggy mattered not a whit.
But before setting out, I revisited my search efforts on the names of those buried there. Especially the child. I have a thing about identifying the children and matching them up with family.
Well last efforts produced little data. But the gods were smiling on my efforts this time. I started finding more information including a 1934 survey of the cemetery by Franklin Garrett. That yielded several additional graves with markers that were not in Find A Grave. Is there any cemetery in the Atlanta area that Franklin did not visit and document? That man was a research BEAST!
This time I took my tools and ground probe. Systematic searching and probing found all the missing headstones save one! They were under several inches of accumulated soil and debris. I unearthed and photographed them, updated Find A Grave, and shared what I found with the historical society. I also linked several children, apparent siblings, with parents. Though I did note of a couple that my efforts were supposition based on names, dates, and the graves being set together. Logical conclusions based on the data, but not conclusive proof.
Now that is an experience few people will be able to claim. Probing the ground in a cemetery, locating missing headstones, and digging them up.
I need to go back in better conditions and see if I can find that last missing marker!
I need to go back in better conditions and see if I can find that last missing marker!
Second, TW and I made an initial attempt to clean a Revolutionary War veteran's headstone. The old boy was buried on his land under a False Tomb and later (in the 20th century) marked with a VA issued stone. Unfortunately the gravesite is under a large oak tree in a damp environment. Algae and mildew have severely stained the stone making it all but unreadable. There are clear signs that others are buried nearby, but only field stones and sunken spots remain to show where the graves are. Who they are is lost to history.
Our attempts with D/2 did give impressive results, but as with prior cases it will take weeks and months for the real effects to manifest. We have it on the list to revisit later in the fall.
Third, someone had requested grave photos from a small cemetery, Brown Gresham Cemetery. near Herndon Cemetery where some of my first D/2 efforts lie. This made a great excuse to go check those results.
I managed to find Brown Gresham back in the woods (why are all these places back in the woods?) and was able to provide all the requested grave photos save one. Could not locate it. But in doing so I learned that fewer than half the graves there were recorded in Find A Grave! Lots of sweat, cursing, and mosquito bites later I had everything I could discern added to the database.
As a side note, I am both fascinated and saddened by how quickly these cemeteries are overgrown and forgotten. The last burial there was 1950 yet it is all but totally lost today.
Then again, 71 years ago is not exactly 'just yesterday'.
Damn! I am OLD!
Third, well, this is a cemetery/genealogy mashup and requires some history to set things up.
TW's father transferred power of attorney to her for a family plot in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta some years back. For those not familiar with Oakland, it was initially founded in the mid 1800s and expanded several times. Being a Victorian Era cemetery, it has more than a few ornate monuments and mausoleums. And various people of note including Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell and golfing legend Bobby Jones.
TW's Great-Great-Grandfather purchased the lot in 1877 (remember that date - it will be important later) and the last burial was in 1963 when her Great-Grandmother (TW's father's mother) passed away. Her Grandmother had donned the mantel as her mother aged and grew ill, and her father, being an only child, was assigned the role when he own mother aged and grew ill.
Well, as you might expect, this role came with a smattering of semi-random scraps and pages of paper giving various bits of history on the plot and those buried there.
There were three burials (two unmarked) where the relationship to the family was not obvious. Two of these James and Lillian (a child of only about a year in age) Hollis were rather easily linked. James had married Cora Ellen, daughter of the plot owner (W C McDade and his wife Lucy, TW's GGPs). They had daughter Lillian who died so tragically young. James passed just over a decade later. Cora Ellen lived another six plus decades, remarried, and is interred in Florida.
Easy, peasy.
Then there was Frankie. Frankie McDade.
Part of the documentation TW had was a map of the plot giving each burial, name, dates, etc. Well, mostly. Not every burial was equally documented. This page is a duplicate of what is on file with the Sexton at Oakland Cemetery. And that is all there is at the cemetery for the plot.
Problem is, there are no dates. Nor is there anything showing how Frankie is related to the family. Just an age. One year.
Now I will not detail everything I checked in my efforts to locate Frankie's details. Just know that I was pretty damned exhaustive. No Census record, no Birth or Death Certificate, nothing. I searched old newspapers on-line (no, I did not read decades of papers page by page, only on-line searches, again important info for later). I even went so far as to physically check every surviving burial permit for the cemetery at the area history center.
There is a separate data element from the cemetery - a list of burials, one entry listing Frank A McDade, born about 1870 and buried 27 July 1875. But it gives no data as to where in the cemetery this burial took place.
The only person living who might have an idea who Frankie was is TW's father. And while his memories are vivid and expansive, he had no knowledge of Frankie.
I had resigned myself to the fact that Frankie would be one of those brink wall mysteries all genealogy researchers eventually hit.
Fast forward several years. TW is sorting though all her inherited papers and photographs. I am scanning them for electronic storage and sharing with the extended family and she is organizing them and identifying the individuals in photos. All this before the knowledge is lost to history.
One of the bits of ephemera is a kinda-sorta family tree series of pages. Well, not a Tree so such as Spaghetti. It was painful to read. And I am never trusting of random bits of undocumented history. Peoples' memories are .... fallible and hazy. And often totally wrong. So I had not really read any of the material during the scanning process.
TW, however, did read it. And swore she recognized the handwriting as her grandmother's. We started comparing it to what I had documented from other sources.
The first thing we found was that I had a Daughter-In-Law and several Grandchildren of W C and Lucy McDade on the tree as their children instead. In my defense this is because that is how they are enumerated on the 1900 Census! These not being direct ancestors for TW, I had not spend any time on them so did not catch the error.
This finding gave good validation that the documents were fairly accurate.
Working further who should we find? Yup. Frankie! Frankie is listed as a child of W C and Lucy McDade. That would certainly explain his burial in their plot. But is this the only documentation?
One of TW's distant cousins had also researched the family and had shared her data. So I checked to see if she had anything on Frankie. She did. And it included a newspaper clipping (not fully attributed) of a funeral announcement for Frankie which lists his parents as Mr and Mrs W C McDade. When was this published? 27 July 1875.
Son of a ....... We done found Frankie! The cousin has him born in 1873 while the burial record has his birth about 1870, yet the burial map has his age as 1. Go figure. Whether he was 1, 2, or 5 years old, he was a child with all the tragedy that any such death entails.
Son of a ....... We done found Frankie! The cousin has him born in 1873 while the burial record has his birth about 1870, yet the burial map has his age as 1. Go figure. Whether he was 1, 2, or 5 years old, he was a child with all the tragedy that any such death entails.
But wait a second. The pieces do not exactly fit. We have a problem. Or at least a question.
Frankie died in 1875. The family plot was not purchased until 1977. Where the hell was he for those two years?!
Dammit!
All is not despair, though. At least not year. There is a possible explanation. It makes a good story, anyway. And I have to go to the cemetery to research to see if it meets with any documented facts.
To explain -
WC McDade's mother, Rebecca, is also buried in the same cemetery, but in another plot with one of her daughter's family. Also, someone has recorded an infant McDade buried in that same plot but without any dates. Now, this plot is in an older cemetery section than where W C McDade's plot lies. So it is entirely possible that Frankie was initially interred in his sister's plot then exhumed and re-interred in his plot later. I have to see if the dates support this theory and if, just maybe, there are any records for the sister's plot about an exhumation.
Can you imagine if I end up proving my theory? Finding proof of a child's burial, exhumation, and reburial almost a century and a half after the fact?
To answer you burning question, Yes. I do have better things to do with my time. But such as the wages of poor life choices.
To answer you burning question, Yes. I do have better things to do with my time. But such as the wages of poor life choices.
