Two can be as bad as one. It's the loneliest number since the number one." - Three Dog Night
Poppa Br'er has gotten the bug. Well, at least it is flaring up if it is a pre-existing condition. Much of the territory that I roam finding and visiting old cemeteries is his old stomping ground. So he has been taking more than a little delight roving hither and yon spotting cemeteries and reminiscing about his younger and wilder days.
He and Mamma Br'er were recounting having passed a few small cemeteries recently. He gave me kinda-sorta directions to the locations. I use Find A Grave's map function to scan the locations and see if they are already recorded. Then I make a plan to either go find them myself or have him show them to me on one of the outings (he makes regular trips for family reasons and rather enjoys being chauffeured around these days. It allows him to look around without being in danger of crashing the car.
I fired up my search engines and started looking for these places.
One shows on the map that I don't think I will ever be able to access. At least not without violating a number of laws. And looking at the location, I don't think I want to take on another hike into the woods.
One can only imagine the story that lies untold there.
A single headstone shared by two brothers who each died as infants. Neither reached a year old and they were not alive at the same time.
Bennie Bray lived a scant seven months: 12 Nov 1888 to 14 Jun 1889.
Ira Bray survived a little longer making the eight month mark: 14 Jun 1890 to 4 Mar 1891
These are the only two burials recorded at the site. The description states there may be a third, unmarked grave. If there is, it is almost certainly another member of the same family.
Their parents rest some 15 miles away in a church graveyard having outlived these two sons (there are at least nine more children) by some 30 to 40 years.
I would have to research land records to confirm my theory, but what I envision is that the land where these two boys are buried was the family farm at the time. At some point in the ensuing 10-15 years the family relocated further north, closer to the church where the parents and other family would ultimately be buried. And, I note that the boys' grandmother was already buried in as she passed away when Bennie was a mere three days old. (Side note: The grandfather appears to have died at some point between 1880 and 1900 as he appears on the 1880 census and not on the 1900 when he would have been about 85 years old. I can speculate that he is in the same cemetery as his wife, but is not marked or not recorded there in Find A Grave)
Since the boys share a headstone and Ira was not yet born when Bennie died, it is clear that Bennie probably lay in an unmarked grave for almost two years. That it was only after Ira died that there was a marker placed.
Was this a matter of finances? Were there insufficient funds for two stones? Was it that there didn't seem to be a good enough reason to mark a single grave and it was only when the second child died did the parents see sufficient cause to place a marker?
And you have to wonder when the family last visited the graves.
So. Two totally switch genres from Rock Music lyrics to J.R.R. Tolkien parody;
In two graves in the wood lay to infants. Not ornate, maintained, visited graves, but lonely, forgotten, untended graves. And that is sad.
No comments:
Post a Comment